I’ve been thinking about getting a new wireless router that I could install dd-wrt on, an open Linux replacement firmware, which gives you all kinds of nice features. I started this journey on the dd-wrt website to try to figure out what good options are right now. It was a confusing support matrix that I couldn’t really compare very well.

Then something occurred to me, perhaps there were some comments on newegg reviews for equipment about people doing this. Newegg is a pretty technically competent community, so this wasn’t that much of a stretch. I popped “ddwrt” into the search engine, and was surprised by the results, which looked something like this:

Linksys WRT54GL 802.11b/g Wireless Broadband Router up to 54Mbps/ Compatible with Open Source DD-WRT (not pre-load)

There are currently 11 routers on newegg that list DD-WRT in their title. Being open is now a selling feature of these products. How cool is that.