New here - built GT-BE98-Pro from source

[tbeltrans]

New here, and just finished building the Asuswrt-Merlin firmware for my new Asus GT-BE98-Pro router that I just purchased today from the local Microcenter. I wanted to thank the folks who created and maintain this project. I used a multipass environment because it seemed much easier to set up and get a successful build in than some of the alternatives I tried. I did make a few deviations from the instructions I found that might be helpful for somebody else:

- for the multipass launch command line arguments, I used a disk of 64G and memory of 16G becasue I ran out of space during the build with the suggested 32G disk and 2G memory. I figured since I have the space, to just go big rather than experimenting by gradually increasing the size of disk and memory.

- instead of the suggested sudo dpkg-reconfigure dash, I used sudo ln -sf /bin/bash /bin/sh.

These are minor details, but may save somebody time if they are just getting started with this process. For context, my development environment is a Lenovo X1 Carbon Gen 12 Thinkpad that I bought a few months ago. It has never run Windows because I removed the supplied SSD and installed a 4TB in its place and then Ubuntu 24.04 LTS Studio (for music production). The environment for this project for me is multipass with Ubuntu 20.04 as recommended.

Again, I am truly grateful for this project. I know from experinece in my working life as an embedded developer (now retired) how much knowledge and work go into starting and maintaining a project such as this. At 72 years old and 12 years into retirement, it was fun to get back into some of this type of thing again.

Tony

 

[KevTech]

Asus also supply's the GPL on the site.

ROG Rapture GT-BE98 Pro | Networking｜ROG - Republic of Gamers｜ROG USA

GT-BE98 Pro Quad-band WiFi 7 (802.11be) Gaming Router, support new 320MHz bandwidth & 4096-QAM, Multi-link operation (MLO), Dual 10G ports, VPN Fusion, Triple-level game acceleration, Mobile game mode, AURA RGB, backup WAN, subscription free network security and AiMesh support.

rog.asus.com

Select others for the OS.

 

[tbeltrans]

Thanks KevTech. That was quite helpful. There were also some useful tools such as the firmware restore utility. I suppose I could commandeer my wife's computer if I need to do that. I did download the firmware and will take a look at that. If I understand correctly, the project here is largely built on what Asus provides to the Open Source community, which (to me) speaks highly of the company. Lenovo's support for Linux is a big part of why I chose this laptop. I remember discussions between us engineers and the company lawyers wrangling over what to provide back to the Open Source community. We felt that giving back was the right thing, and usually we got something to give back.

 

[RMerlin]

There were also some useful tools such as the firmware restore utility. I suppose I could commandeer my wife's computer if I need to do that.

The Firmware Recovery Tool is largely just a UI with device discovery combined with a tftp client. You could do the same thing transferring a firmware image using tftp (triple-check that you are transferring the correct file, as the tftp process does not do as much pre-flashing validation as the regular firmware upgrade process).

Some models also have a bootloader webui while in recovery mode, I would check first if your model does (I haven't needed to use recovery yet on the Wifi 7 models, so I'm not entirely sure if that webui still exists today).

In either case, you might want to set a static IP on your PC first.

 

[tbeltrans]

Thanks RMerlin. That info is helpful. After reading, I installed the tftp-ha package. Setting a static IP is no problem for me. I will be spending time with this router over the next several days and can check on its firmware restore capabilities.