Currently the only way for my desktop PCs to connect to our network ( and therefore our internet ) is via wireless. Current computer count is 8 and I do not wish to purchase wireless PCI cards for each of these ( nearly £200! ), in addition to the fact I wish to run Linux on these machines, where wireless support is patchy.

Ideally, I would like to create this setup..

One Linux machine which is connected to the wireless LAN and has another wired interface which connects to my wired hub. This would then act a DHCP server and gateway for all the PCs connected to the wired hub.

I believe this would then mean all my wired computers would believe they have a direct connection to the internet ( despite going through one gateway and then a router ) and would mean only buying one wireless PCI card! Also, this gives me a lot of control over internet access from my wired computers ( bandwidth throttling is the main concern but is a topic for later ).

Can anyone give me some reference material or advice on achieving this kind of set up?

Thank you

EDIT: Somehow managed to post this with the title "Wired ,> Wireless Gateway Setup" instead of the intended "Wired <> Wireless Gateway Setup".. if this could be rectified I would appreciate the fix.

Should be straightforward provided you make sure that the wireless card is supported under linux and your distro in particular.

Once the linux box is talking to the internet successfully then setting up a DHCP server on the internal wired card is straightforward. You should also use a firewall on the box and you may want to run a local DNS server. I do't know what distro you are using but in SuSE all of this can be done with the GUI admin tool YaST. I also use Squid as a proxy server so that all client web access goes through that. It makes it a bit more secure (you can lock down the routing stuff) and you have a lot more control and visibility of what the users do (you mentioned bandwidth throttling).

All of this stuff is pretty standard and probably covered in tutorials here or in the manuals on your machine.

I plan to use Fedora Core 5 on this gateway machine, mainly due to familiarity but I am always willing to try new things

I would prefer not to use a proxy server as it means changing settings on each "client" machine where I would much prefer it to all be invisible. Is this at all possible?

I brought 2 wireless PCI cards for my main desktop PCs, of differing manufacturers to increase the chance of one of them working under Linux ( whether natively or through ndiswrapper makes no odds to me and long as long as it works )

You can set up Squid for transparent proxying - ie no client reconfiguration as http requests are intercepted and rerouted to the proxy server. Only downside is that all clients then appear as if from the router/firewall so you can't do individual client restrictions.