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I will use the Ser­ial Port to con­nect La Fon­era, there are also other meth­ods to flash Open­wrt on La Fon­era but my Router was bricked some­how I just had this solu­tion (Red­Boot) left..

This method is com­pletely sol­der­ing less; I used some old CD-Rom audio cables to con­nect the ser­ial Pins on La Fon­era. The ser­ial sig­nals are 3.3v so you need a level shifter. I already wrote this guide about ser­ial connections…

Con­fig­ure you Ser­ial set­tings: 9600–8-N (no flow control).

Impor­tant note ripped from http://www.easy2design.de/bla/?page_id=98:
As pointed out by Dark­Blade (I also expe­ri­enced this, but thought I just built my ser­ial cable to crappy(ly)…): It seems that the Fon­era some­times (or always?) doens’t want to boot when con­nected to ser­ial. I nar­rowd it down to the con­nected TX at the Fon­era side. If you don’t see any­thing and the lit­tle sucker appar­ently isn’t boot­ing at all, dis­con­nect the TX from the Fon­era and boot with RX con­nected only. Once you see the first line of out­put run­ning over your screen, quickly con­nect TX line, too. Other peo­ple just tried boot­ing and con­nect­ing the ser­ial cable only 5sec later, though i sup­pose you will need some prac­tice, as the point where you need to acti­vate the Red­Boot boot­loader will come after only a few lines of ser­ial out­put. Just play a lit­tle and be quick :)
I just con­nected the power cable to La Fon­era and 1-2s later I con­nected the TX and RX lines (GND was already con­nected). This worked like a charm.

Ok, let’s flash Open­wrt on La Fonera:

STEP 1, Prepare:

The reset is needed to accept your set­tings!
WARNING: the option “fcon­fig net_debug true” will enable Red­Boot LAN access BUT your net­work per­for­mance will be arround 2500 b/s! So do NOT use it when you have a ser­ial con­nec­tion! You can enable this option when Open­wrt runs on this beast so you don’t need to attach the ser­ial cables anymore.

Out­put:

Now La Fon­era is clean, the Ker­nel and the Root-Filesystem are deleted.

Hint about %{FREEMEMLO}: Addi­tion­ally, nick­names can be used like aliases via the for­mat %{nick­name}. This allows the val­ues stored by fcon­fig to be used directly by scripts and commands.

Out­put (took about 1s to load the file):

Out­put (took about 2mins to store the file into the flash):

now cal­cu­late, sub­tract the two num­bers, result is 0x0LENGTH

out­put:

accord­ing to my cal­cu­la­tor, 0xA87E0000 — 0xA80E0000 should be 0x0700000..

out­put:

out­put (took about 4mins to store):

out­put:

Now Open­wrt should be run­ning on your fonera.

Some handy Red Boot infor­ma­tion:
Doc­u­men­ta­tion: http://ecos.sourceware.org/docs-latest/redboot/redboot-guide.html

Com­mand overview:

Thanks to those HowTo’s:
http://www.easy2design.de/bla/?page_id=98
http://wiki.x-wrt.org/index.php/Kamikaze_Installation#Configuring_RedBoot
http://wiki.openwrt.org/OpenWrtDocs/Hardware/Fon/Fonera?highlight=%28fonera%29
.. and some more…

EDIT, 30.11.07:
I had sev­eral strange errors on my Fon­era router, examples:

While the wifi com­mand was work­ing, I received an error:
SQUASHFS error: lzma returned unex­pected result 0x1
SQUASHFS error: Unable to read page, block 1740c3, size 591b

I also noticed ran­dom freeze and / or ker­nel oops, espe­cially when I tried to get the wire­less work­ing (the wifi command).

I bought my Fon­era router 2nd hand and there was a replace­ment AC/DC adapter included and THIS was the bas­tard! La Fon­era needed more cur­rent but my cheap AC/DC adapter pro­vided only 500mA where on the Fon­era a sticker told me, that he need 2A! I tried it with a 1A adapter and so far I didn’t rec­og­nize any errors!

I also used my volt­meter on the JTAG pins GND and VCC. While the wifi com­mand worked, the volt­age dropped from 3.28V to 3.17V with the old adapter. With the new adapter the volt­age drops to 3.24V so I guess I try to get another AC/DC adapter.