Prepare OpenWRT 23.05.x on Ubuntu 22.04

• This page describes the preparations you need to make in order to build OpenWRT with the included MESHdesk packages.
• The SDK and the build process require ~30-40G of disk space.
• Install the required packages to ensure that the SDK can build the firmware.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install build-essential subversion git-core libncurses5-dev zlib1g-dev gawk flex quilt libssl-dev xsltproc libxml-parser-perl unzip mercurial

• Create the location for the SDK
• We recommend that you create a folder that contains the version of the firmware you are going to build.
• You must do this as a normal Linux user (not root).
• Here we create a folder for version 23.05.5.

# Create the working directory 
mkdir 23.05.5
# Change to our working directory 
cd 23.05.5

• Perform a clean checkout of the OpenWrt repository.

git clone https://git.openwrt.org/openwrt/openwrt.git

• This repository has different branches. To see which branches are available and which one we are currently using, enter the following command.

#First we may need to change our directory to the openwrt directory
cd openwrt
git branch -a
#Also to see the tags 
git tag -l

• We will checkout the tag v23.05.5.

git checkout v23.05.5

• Confirm that this v23.05.5 is now checked out.

git branch

• Update the package feeds.

./scripts/feeds update

• Make sure the following packages are installed as they are required for the MESHdesk package.

./scripts/feeds install coova-chilli
./scripts/feeds install luasocket
./scripts/feeds install libuci-lua
./scripts/feeds install curl
./scripts/feeds install -a -p routing 
./scripts/feeds install iwinfo
./scripts/feeds install luci
./scripts/feeds install luci-theme-material
./scripts/feeds install mosquitto
./scripts/feeds install lua-mosquitto
#For backward compatibility in 23.05 with older Luci libs
./scripts/feeds install luci-compat
#Add the iptables translator package to translate iptables to nftables
./scripts/feeds install  iptables-nft
#Add these Luci packages
./scripts/feeds install luci-lib-nixio
./scripts/feeds install luci-lib-jsonc
./scripts/feeds install luci-lib-json
./scripts/feeds install luci-lib-httpprotoutils
./scripts/feeds install luci-lib-httpclient
./scripts/feeds install luci-lib-base
#If you are going to implement OpenVPN tunnels
./scripts/feeds install openvpn-openssl
#If you are going to do Hotspot 2.0
./scripts/feeds install iw-full
#If you will use SQM/CAKE for bandwidth limiting and controlling Buffer Bloat (Work In Progress Jul 2023)
./scripts/feeds install sqm-scripts
./scripts/feeds install luci-app-sqm
#If you will implement the Multi-WAN functionality
./scripts/feeds install mwan3
./scripts/feeds install luci-app-mwan3
#With Multi-WAN you might need the LTE related packages
./scripts/feeds install usb-modeswitch
./scripts/feeds install picocom
./scripts/feeds install uqmi
./scripts/feeds install kmod-usb-net-cdc-mbim
./scripts/feeds install kmod-usb-net-qmi-wwan
./scripts/feeds install kmod-usb-serial-option 
./scripts/feeds install kmod-usb-serial-qualcomm
./scripts/feeds install kmod-usb-serial-sierrawireless
./scripts/feeds install kmod-usb-wdm 
./scripts/feeds install qmi-util
./scripts/feeds install libqmi
./scripts/feeds install luci-protp-qmi

• Now everything is ready to add the MESHdesk package.

OpenWRT 23.05.x with MESHdesk packages