Notes on Setting up a Wireless Bridge/Router:
This is a tremendously convenient way to set up a wireless router and linux and openBSD both have great facilities for making it happen. Advantages include:

• Integrated uninterruptable power supply
• Direct interface to most wireless cards without ISA/PCI bridge
• Small form factor
• Low system requirements and ready availability of old laptops at low prices

what it takes (hardware):
A pentium laptop suits me fine. Use your own judgement. If you find a 486 or other architecture that does it well, let me know, and I'll add your config to this page. I haven't tried anything with USB yet, and this document assumes that you're using a PCMCIA bus to connect both wired and wireless NICs. Before you get to serious, make sure your PCMCIA controller chipset and cards are supported by the operating system of your choice. As a side note, if you've got a display you can "borrow" for setup, consider getting a laptop with a cracked display... they go cheap and are fine for a router

what it takes (software):
Linux 2.2.x and up and OpenBSD 2.7 and up should have just what you need. For the strong-of-heart, miniature x86 linux distributions like LEM and JailBait are great (with the installation of pcmcia services 3.1.x and up, dhcpd, drivers). For people who want things working quickly, Redhat 7 was amazingly painless and worked almost immediately.
Linux PCMCIA support is available as a seperate package, as is a DHCP server for the wireless subnet. Drivers are available from card providers or public projects. IP masquerading is available in most linux kernels 2.2 and up; if not, you can rebuild the kernel to support it.
OpenBSD has integrated support for some pcmcia buses and wireless cards, but has the bonus of the Berkeley packet filter to perform ip NAT (easier than...).
Some working configurations:
Samsung Harris Prism I - based cards, under lem/6 linux 2.2.14-50 on a Compaq Armada 7350:

• check your included memory addresses in your /etc/pcmcia/config.opts. For these laptops, include port 0x240-0x400, 0x1000-0x17ff works just fine.
• compaq uses the ti1130 cardbus controller: you'll need to specify PCIC_OPTS=irq_list=5,7,9,11 in your pcmcia configuration (location is system dependent) to avoid hellish pcmcia crashes.
• use the linux wlan drivers from absolute value systems for all Prism I based cards.

Lucent ORiNOCO silver 11Mbit, Redhat 7.0, pcmcia services 3.1.24, on a CompaqArmada 7350 (ORiNOCO wavelan2 drivers):

• if you get an HCF "Error 131" in your system logfiles/output on card insertion, you have a memory range conflict. Adjust your /etc/pcmcia/config.opts accordingly, as mentioned above.
• remember to use only IRQs 5,7,9,10, also as mentioned above