Lifehacker has an interesting post on the Tomato custom router firmware. When a friend emailed me about the Lifehacker post, I first dismissed the article because when I was deciding on which firmware to flash my Linksys WRT54GL with, I looked at Tomato but didn’t think it was as powerful as DD-WRT or OpenWRT. However, when I read Lifehacker’s post my interest was re-sparked in Tomato. The author did admit that dd-wrt had a more robust feature set and polished admin interface. However, he also indicated that Tomato had a better layout, better Quality of Service (QOS) support, and prettier graphical charts than dd-wrt. Also, the average user probably wouldn’t use the more powerful dd-wrt features anyway.

I wish I had the time/patience to re-flash my Linksys WRT54GL with Tomato just to try it out. Its very unlikely that I will because I don’t want to risk bricking my perfectly functioning dd-wrt enabled router. I also really like dd-wrt. Too bad flashing a router is a lot more complex than just installing software.

Also, the Lifehacker article doesn’t mention OpenWRT (a couple of commenters do) but OpenWRT seems to be the hard-core geek’s choice. I’ve thought about making the switch to it but it is probably more complex than I want to deal with. I really considered OpenWRT over DD-WRT but DD-WRT’s site looked better maintained and easier to read. Plus, until recently all OpenWRT management seemed like it when through a Linux shell (i.e., command line). Now though x-wrt seems to address what some would call a short coming of OpenWRT.

If anyone wants to send me a Linksys WRT54GL so I can experiment with it and write more tutorials on firmware flashing, let me know and I can add it to my Amazon Wish List so you can send it to me easily. Also, don’t forget to check out my ever-popular “How to Flash the WRT54GL with DD-WRT Firmware” tutorial.