• This page will cover the preparation work for you to be able to build the OpenWRT based MESHdesk firmware.
• The SDK and build process will require ~30-40G of hard drive space.
• Install the required packages to ensure 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
• Our suggestion is to create a folder that will indicate the version of the firmware you'll be building.
• Here we create a folder for the 21.02.0 release.

21.02.0 is the most stable of the 21.02 branch. The 21.02.1 release (current as the time of this writing) has stability issues on the mesh.

# Create the working directory 
mkdir 21.02.0
# Change to our working directory 
cd 21.02.0

• Do a clean checkout of the OpenWRT repository.

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

• This repository has various branches. To see which branches are available and which one we are currently set to use, issue the following command.

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

• We will be checking out the v21.02.0 tag.

git checkout v21.02.0

• Confirm that this v21.02.0 is now checked out.

git branch

• Update the package feeds.

./scripts/feeds update

• Ensure the following packages are installed since they are required by 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 21.02 with older Luci libs
./scripts/feeds install luci-compat

• Everything is now prepared for us to add the MESHdesk package.