Making the WRN3500L into a Print Server

The Netgear WRN3500L came to my notice very recently when a local store had it on sale for the same price as the venerable Linksys WRT54GL, my go-to router for stable-as-a-rock installs for many years. The WRN3500L is also a Linux router, but it has all sorts of cool extras; Wireless N, gigabit Ethernet, and coolest of all, a USB port! Sadly, the supplied firmware didn't have any print server capabilities, and I really wanted that feature.

So, I've managed to turn my Netgear WRN3500L router into a print server (while still keeping it as a nice router). I did so using the standard DD-WRT build and an extra package that I downloaded using ipkg, the package-manager for OpenWrt and DD-WRT.

I used the following resources:

myopenrouter.com
The DD-WRT router database and wiki

Read on for my detailed instructions on doing it yourself. And feel free to comment if you have found things I should add or change.

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liqbase in beta testing; shiny!

There's a very cool Internet Tablet application out there called liqbase. It shows off the tablet in a whole new way. Among other things, you can sketch, read books, or pan around a map quickly and smoothly. You can scan through your archive of past sketches on the Graffiti Wall, or you can bump the sketches around on a playing field with the Physics Demo. You may have seen lcuk's videos or you may have seen lcuk presenting at the maemo summit (Jamie should be getting some video of that soon), but you figured it was just a demo. And until this month, it was.

Now you can play with this flashy little app yourself; it is no longer a shaky playtest demo, it is a usable beta-quality app. Gary (lcuk) has been working hard to get things user-ready, and he's finally ready to share it with all of us.

Go over to liqbase.net to get a copy of this shiny little toy, and if you have problems, you can post on the ITt thread, the #maemo channel on IRC, or at the Garage project page. You'll get a fast response; lcuk doesn't seem to sleep much, and he seems to respond so quickly sometimes you wonder if he wasn't watching you type.