The thing is: I have two computers, and wifi router, however one of these computers is very old, so there is no simple way to obtain wifi connection. So I am thinking to connect these computers with simple switch, my notebook has eth and wlan interfaces so I think it will be..ee...gateway?.. for another. I mean the second should connect to internet via notebook. Help me to find explanation, recipe, howto's for what I am planning. I hope my explanation are clear enough.

If you have a wireless router, there's no need to do anything fancy... unless your goal is to not use the router's dhcp server and gateway. All you need to do is hook up the devices to the router (either via ethernet or via wireless), and the router will provide them with an IP and the computers should be able to start talking to each other. As far as ethernet is concerned, just run netconfig as root and select the dhcp option. You might need to run /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1 restart_eth0 to restart the service and have it connect to the router to get the IP. For wireless, run netconfig and select Network Manager. Then when you're booted up, use the graphical client to connect to the wireless network.

If your wireless "router" is a MiFi unit without ethernet ports (quite common here in Ireland) you could connect your old PC to the laptop using a crossover cable (cheaper than switch), and connect the laptop wirelessly to the router. The wireless adapter on your laptop will have the same IP range as the router (192.168.1.xxx for example) while the ethernet adapter will have an address in a different range (172.16.1.xxx for example). Your PC should be given an address in the same range as the laptop's ethernet adapter. IP forwarding should then be enabled on the laptop, and the old PC should have its gateway set to the ethernet address of the laptop, with DNS according to your preference.

2 members found this post helpful.

yeah wireless router, or wired router that'd get you hook up together