G'day,

I've ported version 2.10.2 of the Netrek Vanilla Server to run on the
Broadcom platform used by LinkSys WRT54G and clones, using the OpenWrt
build tools.  My prototype is running on an Asustek WL-HDD2.5, which is
a 802.11g wireless 2.5" IDE drive box with a 125MHz processor and 16MB
RAM.  It runs from 5V at 800mA.

It's really neat to play Netrek against a server small enough to sit in
the palm of your hand, at a price point comparable to a restaurant
drinks bill.

All the files are on http://quozl.linux.org.au/netrek/

- netrek-server-vanilla-2.10.2-openwrt-1.0-rc5.tar.gz is the binary
  tarball, for unpacking in /mnt/netrek-server-vanilla, then bin/netrekd
  is run to start the server,

- netrek-server-vanilla-2.10.2-openwrt-1.0-rc5.patch are the changes
  necessary to get the code to cross-compile on the OpenWrt 1.0 RC5
  build root,

- netrek-server-vanilla-2.10.2-openwrt-1.0-rc5.src.tar.gz is my work in
  progress source tree within the build root, for building an ipkg file
  which is the OpenWrt distribution format.


A few notes ...

1.  to avoid the need for X and curses, the xsg, pledit, and showgalaxy
    programs were omitted,

2.  to avoid the need for GDBM or GLIB, the player database is not
    indexed, PLAYER_INDEX is undefined,

3.  to avoid the need for libgmp, the res-rsa support was removed,
    though clearly this could be added back in later with more effort,

4.  the build was done with the assumption of some meaningful
    filesystem, which could be either NFS, USB, or local disk, according
    to the OpenWrt device in use,

5.  the new multicast server discovery protocol worked fine,

6.  load testing isn't complete, but in my first try there was no
    difficulty handling three or four clients and a few robots ... no
    reason why it cannot handle 16 clients, but I'll give that a more
    thorough try later,

7.  most of the porting effort was learning the build system and editing
    down the configure script to remove test programs ... when cross
    compiling configure cannot run a test program.

Comments welcome.

-- 
James Cameron    mailto:quozl at us.netrek.org     http://quozl.netrek.org/
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