OpenWrt Package Installation Failure on Rugged SOM (Stale Snapshot Repositories)

BotBlox Software
1

This topic was migrated from the BotBlox ticketing system after being summarized and anonymized.

Problem:

Customer was unable to install software packages on a Rugged SOM (eMMC variant) running OpenWrt 24.10-SNAPSHOT (r28578). Running opkg update failed with:

  • “wget returned 8”
  • Failed to download the package list

The package repositories associated with that snapshot build were no longer available.

Answer:

Known OpenWrt snapshot issue. The package feed URLs in distfeeds.conf pointed to repositories that no longer existed.

The workaround was to manually update the package feed sources to point to valid repositories.

What Worked:

  • Editing /etc/opkg/distfeeds.conf with updated package source URLs.
  • Following the workaround documented in the BotBlox forum.

What Didn’t Work:

  • Running “opkg update” with the original snapshot package sources.
  • Attempting to install packages before updating the feed URLs.

Final Status:

Resolved via package feed reconfiguration.

No hardware issue was present. The problem was caused by OpenWrt snapshot repositories being removed after the image was built. A permanent fix was planned for the next Rugged SOM software release.

Conclusion:

If “opkg update” returns “wget returned 8” on Rugged SOM snapshot builds, check whether the package feeds point to expired OpenWrt snapshot repositories and update /etc/opkg/distfeeds.conf accordingly.

(TS2512-0075)