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Tomato
A while back I got a GPD mini laptop running bazzite, it has a 7” screen and surprising amounts of power. However, at times I want a bigger screen, so I experimented with sunshine/moonlight to stream video from the small machine to the bigger screens. This worked both to my mac screen and my projector, but a thick wall makes it run quite choppy where I prefer to sit.
I decided to put a dust collecting spare Netgear R7000 WiFi router to good use. This can be placed in the middle to bridge the 2.4GHz WiFi to my bad unmovable ISP provided access point exposing a 5GHz access point right where I need it. Moreover, I can even use it cabled if I want to.
The first order of business, was to reset the device as I completely for got all login details. For that, I had to use the 30/30/30 method to reset it, that is:
- While on, press reset for 30s
- Turn off, still holding reset another 30s
- Turn on, keep pressing for 30s The normal 7s reset did not reset credentials.
I Installed FreshTomato on the unlocked device. This gives me less bloat, a better OS, VPN, ad blocking, and ssh (access which I don’t need but somehow like to have). The install is split into 2 steps, first restore an initial firmware, and once booted into the new system restore the latest (2026.2 at the time of writing) firmware. This worked beautifully.
Finally I switched the wl1 device on the router to Wireless Ethernet Bridge with my ISP SSID/key, set the Gateway and DNS to my home router IP, and kept wl1 in Access Point mode. This was a little fiddly to discover, but is quite straight forward once you understand what you are doing. At least I think I understand what I did now.
This was a single afternoon project, actually improved something, and really helped me scratched my tinkering with stuff itch. Good stuff.