I have a Windows 7 machine which is having issues with a Linksys Rangeplus wireless card, specifically kernel dumps every couple of hours. I have an old (really old) tower sitting in my room which I would like to turn into a wireless bridge so that I could connect the windows box to the internet without dealing with the blue screens.

I plan on using Knoppix as I have it available already, but if it would be easier with another distro I can always download it.

Any help, guides, suggestions, etc would be appreciated. If this doesn't work I'm going to have to buy an old WRT54G offline and convert that with DD-WRT...

Well you could certainly do that, but frankly it would be cheaper and easier to either:

A. Get a supported WiFi device for your Windows 7 machine, the cost of USB WiFi adapters is ridiculously low anymore; even for high-powered ones with large antennas.

B. Get a commercial wireless bridge, which are often marketed as "wireless gaming adapters" (which were a niche market before game consoles had their own WiFi hardware).

In either case, the whole thing shouldn't cost more than $30 if you are looking in the right places. Compared to setting up the computer as a bridge, which would take much longer and in the end would be much more expensive considering the energy consumption of old PC hardware compared to a USB device or small wireless bridge.

Now if you wanted to do something else with the computer, like serve media files or something like that, I could see it. But as it is I don't see the logic personally.

If you want to use knoppix as a wireless bridge between a wireless interface (ath0/wifi0/rausb0) and a hardware interface (eth0), you can do the following but the catch is that the hardware port eth0 will be NAD'd (behind a firewall):

echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward
iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o eth0 -j MASQUERADE

then:
set eth0 to a new subnet.
set your win7 client (connected to LAN interface)
static IP on that subnet
gateway to the IP of LAN interface
DNS to IP of gateway of WAN interface

I do this and it works great.

More details at http://lindesk.com/2007/04/internet-...sing-iptables/

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Thanks, I'll try that tonight.