Ewrt is the Enhanced WRT linux flavor for the Linksys WRT54G and WRT54GS wireless routers. It was originally created by Irving Popovetsky and Brandon Psmythe of Portless Networks, a wireless networking company in Portland, OR. It is currently developed and maintained by Troy Jaqua, with the support of Portless.

The goal of our project is to create a stable and easy to use hotspot-in-a-box software flavor for use in community and commercial wireless networking projects.

Ewrt differentiates itself from the other available WRT firmwares mainly by providing and developing an integrated captive portal (splashd) based on the current NoCatSplash-CVS, adding sshd support and other features for remote administration, and a writable JFFS2 partition on the flash (e.g. for uploading splash page content, config files, installing 3rd-party software packaged in ipkgs or an optional /opt/rc.boot script which is automatically run after the customized system init.)

We have heavily modified NoCatSplash to run on the router's embedded platform, with many feature improvements, buffer overflow checks, security and stability fixes (vs. the currently unmaintained NoCatSplash-CVS.) We additionally include an optional RADIUS-mode authentication proxy (thanks to the HotSpotZone project!)

We preserved and augmented much of the flavor of the original Linksys firmware including the read-only root filesystem for firmware fail-safety, the secure (HTTPS) web-administration interface which controls many useful packages and features, regional language overlays for the web interface and the custom boot and init process.