SmartRouter

SmartRouter is an open source Linux kernel-based operating system that has been designed from the ground up to act as a GNU/Linux firewall, router and proxy server. It includes numerous attractive features, such as a powerful, web-based interface, port forwarding, QoS, L7 filter, DHCP server, load balance, sub-networks, task scheduling, bridge and DNS cache.

It’s distributed as an installable-only, minimalistic ISO image

The SmartRouter project can be downloaded for free from Softoware or directly from its official website as a minimalistic ISO image that can only be installed on the local drive of your computer. No live mode is provided at this time!

The entire installation process is text-based

The ISO image has only 10MB in size and must be easily written to a USB thumb drive or a CD disc in order to boot it from the BIOS of a computer. It will automatically start the installation process, which is text-based.

At first, you will be informed that the software will partition and format your disk drive, so make sure that you save any important files that are currently stored on that device, as they will be permanently destroyed during the installation process.

It can be easily installed in no more than 5 minutes

You will be asked if you want to install the SmartRouter operating system on the selected disk, then you’ll have to choose between a single or SMP kernel system, enter the size of the partition for the OS and create a second partition if you want.

Yet again, you will be asked if you really want to partition the selected disk drive. The installer will create a FAT32 file system on the primary partition, install the bootloader, mount the new partition and copy the base system from the ISO image to the local drive.

The first time configuration process is also text-based

That’s it! You can now reboot the machine, eject the bootable medium and let the operating system start. It will configure some hardware components and other settings, and will drop you to a shell prompt where you must login with the root account and no password.

The first time configuration process will kick in, allowing you to configure network interfaces, enable the built-in DHCP server, as well as to set a password for the root (system administrator) account. You can easily access the web-based interface of SmartRouter from another computer on the same network.