Take a look over here some guys have made great site on how to set up openwrt on it, And I must say running it for 2/3 weeks now. It turned my device in one bad ass router capable doing almost anything :)
http://wl700g.homelinux.net/

Yes, direct mini-usb jack on the chassis would be way nicer than the usb serial cable hack, I agree. But I’m a hardware novice. If someone would post pictures and instructions, that’d be great!

OpenWRT is a great project. We even donated a WL-700gE to the OpenWRT project so that they could get some real traction with it. We hope they get 100% support soon. Their goals are not the same as ours (for instance, we want only a bootloader in flash), but obviously we want to cheer them on.

So far the only patches I’ve seen to support much of the hardware for the Asus WL-700gE are against the 2.4 kernel. Our efforts involve porting to the 2.6 kernel.

Brett Neumeier has made great strides. He helped me rebuild the Asus “GPL” “source” tarball, and flash it on the system. Also, when last we VNCed together, he was demonstrating how to get network booting to work so we can boot new kernels over the network (thus no need to re-flash for every change) and in that session we worked through mounting a root filesystem over NFS.

So progress is slow, but non-zero.

Wish us luck!

OpenWrt support is close, but not for Whiterussian (aka stable), only for Kamikaze (unstable).

I can see why they would want to do this. Its a machine with great potential: If they complete this project, I’d probably buy one myself.

You might want to have a look here – help them get OpenWRT installed on the device. It’s still a work in progress, but it barely works now.

Now that we have a serial console, it should be possible to build our linux, flash it onto the system, watch it boot, see where it crashes, and make some changes, re-flash, watch it boot, see where it crashes, lather-rinse-repeat. This will be a time consuming and tedious process, I’m sure. At times I expect it to be down right infuratingly frustrating. My hope is that in the end we have a powerful linux server in a tiny package and, more importantly, a deeper understanding of linux, cross-compiling, and embedded systems in general.”

Or, if you guys were really hackers you would have used a small usb enabled PIC to do the serial-> usb conversion. There is plenty of room on that board to add the like 5 parts you would need.

Standard RS-232 is **NOT** 5V; it’s more like +/- 12–25V.