Prepare OpenWRT 21.02.x on Ubuntu 20.04

Prepare The System

• 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.

The 21.02.1 release (current at the time of this writing) have not yet been tested extensively by us.

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

Checkout the SDK

• 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

Install the required packages

• Ensure the following packages is 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.

Install MESHdesk Packages on OpenWRT