Thin client router part3: Bare metal atom

"Bare Metal Atom" is the name of my Skrillex cover band... OK, maybe that joke's not ready for a revival yet.

In this part of my Dell Wyse 3040 thin client hacking series I'm going to bite the bullet and run bare metal OpenWRT on the 3040. In part 1 of the series I showed all the things I needed to do to run any software other than the inbuilt ThinLinux client software. Then I messed-about with a fairly pointless (but personally satisfying) exercise in running a virtual machine of OpenWRT on it in part 2.

Thin client router part 2: virtual insanity

 

So in part 1, I set-up the hardware and the base OS install. Now I'd like to try out OpenWRT with the Dell Wyse 3040 thin client and the Comfast CF-953AX USB3 WiFi6 1800Mbps adapter. Unfortunately the thin client has an Atom x5-Z8350 CPU, which none of the official OpenWRT binaries will run on it directly (more on that in part 3, I guess). Nevertheless, I'd still like to test-out the WiFi adapter with OpenWRT, so I'll do the next best thing: run it in a virtual machine.