Tomato third party Firmware thread for Broadcom based routers

[Moogle Stiltzkin]

Tomato is a small, lean and simple replacement firmware for Linksys' WRT54G/GL/GS, Buffalo WHR-G54S/WHR-HP-G54 and other Broadcom-based routers. It features a new easy to use GUI, a new bandwidth usage monitor, more advanced QOS and access restrictions, enables new wireless features such as WDS and wireless client modes, raises the limits on maximum connections for P2P, allows you to run your custom scripts or telnet/ssh in and do all sorts of things like re-program the SES/AOSS button, adds wireless site survey to see your wifi neighbors, and more.

Website:
http://www.polarcloud.com/tomato


So essentially Tomato is a third party firmware for routers using specifically broadcom cpus. It's basically like DD-WRT, but in my humble opinion better.

Because it has lots of things DD-WRT has, but also has better QOS and bandwidth monitoring features that puts it ahead of DD-WRT.


There are many new variants of tomato firmware forks, the most popular being the following:

Victek RAF
http://victek.is-a-geek.com/

Toastman (my personal favourite as he usually takes all the good parts from the other variants and compiles into his)
http://code.google.com/p/tomato-toastman/

TomatoUSB
http://tomatousb.org/



My Tomato router i'm using is a Linksys E4200 loaded with Toastman's tomato firmware



Some screenshots













QOS guide by Toastman himself (very good and detailed read)
http://www.linksysinfo.org/index.php...cussion.28349/

Here is an easy setup for Toastman's QOS
http://tomatousb.org/tut:easy-toastman-qos-setup



Why use Tomato third party firmware rather than the default/stock firmware for routers ?
Usually there is nothing wrong with the default. But 99.9% of the time, tomato will have way way more features compared to the default firmware for your router brand. Especially in regards to QOS setup and bandwidth monitoring which tomato excels at, besides providing other cool features like Client wireless mode, open vpn and more ....

[Enigma5]

Weird the screenshots you linked do not actually show unless you view them first

[Moogle Stiltzkin]

:d odd ... sorry about that. I use google to obtain images on the quick >_<:

I did post more about the tomato on my blog but i haven't really gotten around to fixing the images on my site ... sigh :{

[jack]

I think the images are referrer locked. Meaning that loading them on the forum, they're blocked since the referrer is not something that the other website approved. But going directly to the image, your referrer is their site, so it's ok. Then the image is cached, you refresh this page, and voila 'it works'. But once you delete your cache, they'll be broken again.

Anyways, more on topic. I haven't used Tomato but it looks cool. I'll keep it in mind the next time someone asks me about 3rd party firmwares.

[Moogle Stiltzkin]

the barrier to using tomato firmware is that you need a broadcom cpu router .... and even then you need the developers to build a support firmware for it. So i would recommend sticking to the popular models that you know the developer has access to and is working on.

[slugbug55]

I use it with my Linksys WRT54GL and have never had a problem with it.

[Hengjie]

Hi Moogle, could you please tell me what sort of instructions you used to install it? I'm particularly interested in flashing it with Toastman's flash images.

Would you recommend a Tomato binary that supports simultaneous dual band?

[Matt]

Hi Moogle, could you please tell me what sort of instructions you used to install it? I'm particularly interested in flashing it with Toastman's flash images.

Would you recommend a Tomato binary that supports simultaneous dual band?

Be important to know which router you want to use.

[Muse]

Be important to know which router you want to use.

I've had the Buffalo WHR-HP-G54 router for 6 years, flashed to DD-WRT v23 SP2 (09/15/06) std

Lately I've had serious problems in my LAN that I'm 99% sure are attributable to the router. Rather than flash a newer version of dd-wrt I want to move to Tomato.

1. What version of Tomato should I use?

2. Can I flash right over my current firmware or should I first revert to a version of the Buffalo firmware, presumably version 1.40?

TIA