Pascal's TechBlog

Saturday, September 17, 2005

Midge

Today I stumbled upon something called Midge, it's a tiny Linux distribution, specifically engineered to run on the ADMtek 5120P SoC (system-on-chip).

The ADMtek 5120P SoC is a 175mHz r4Kc MIPS processor, and has a memory management unit. It has 5 Fast Ethernet interfaces, it can use up to two banks of SDRAM and two banks of Flash memory.

The really cool thing about this is that boatloads of different brand routers use the ADMtek 5120P SoC. And I just happened to have a unused Eminent 4012 Broadband Router lying around, which basically is an overpriced and undersupported equivalent of the Sweex' LB000021 Broadband Router, it just has a better looking case!

Midge didn't support uploading using the vendor's firmware upgrade feature yet, I didn't want to mod my router so I decided to contact Midge's author, Vladislav Moskovets, who was very helpful and sent me an alpha version of Midge which does support this. Uploading the Midge firmware went like a charm.

Midge uses the 2.4.31 Linux kernel, patched with ADMtek 5120P support. It includes the Dropbear SSH daemon, for secure remote access. Midge uses Debian's network configuration scripts, which make Midge easy to configure.

I'm downloading the development toolchain as I'm typing this. Midge should provide me with plenty entertainment for weeks to come.

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