Best custom firmware

[iviv]

I'm getting really frustrated with our current cable belkin wireless N box. Its only just over a year old, and I've spend the last hour convincing it to start working again. The idea of switching to a router using one of those custom firmwares is nice since I like the idea of messing about with stuff like that.

Now, as far as I know, there's three options. Tomato, dd-wrt and OpenWrt. I guess they all support different routers and have different features, so its a little hard to just say 'this one is the best'? I don't know what exact router I'm looking for yet, the two WRT ones have very handy lists on the websites with all the supported devices, so it would be a matter of looking at those and picking one to buy.

But yeah, what's the real difference between these three? And could you recommend a router specifically for running it? The only requirements are for Wireless n, really. IPv6 support would be very handy too, just for a little futureproofing, though given how long that's taking to happen its probably not really needed.

 

[Andy_82]

I've tried both Tomato and DD-WRT (Tomato only supports broadcom based routers where as DD-WRT supports other chipsets) and find tomato to be the best (i'm using toastmans build of tomatousb on an asus rt-n16), especially it's implementation of Quality-Of-Service. It is also simple to use. Has other really useful features i.e. wireless survey which shows you wireless networks around you also has graphs of bandwidth usage for last twenty four hours, and details of bandwidth for daily, weakly and monthly both up and down.

There are several different builds depending on requirements, some have VPN, built in NAS and FTP and DLNA media server for routers with USB ports. There is also a build with built in bittorrent client.

You might want to check out these sites:
http://www.polarcloud.com/tomato/
http://tomatousb.org/ (Has some good tutorials and links of other builds)

Hope this helps