chrisvenus

Well, hopefully soon I should have broadband in my house. Yes, its taken far too long, long story with added ranting that isn't worth going into.

This does mean though that I have to start thinking about networking the house. After talking with wimble a weekend or two back he persuaded me that I didn't need a full blown computer to act as a gateway and router and that probably one of those magic boxes that acts as a router, wireless base station and with a couple of ports for wired networking should do me fine. I think he even told me what model he had but of coure I forgot. :)

So, anybody got experience/advice on this kind of thing, perferably with reccomendations for or against kit they have experience of.

I'm also thinkign that a nice tiny media PC in the living room next to the TV to play all the anime and other random junk from would be good. I'm looking at small shuttle cases and big hard drives and probably running linux (I beleive debian is the popular thing of the day) and some media player. Is there anything I should particularly have in mind when doing this (minimum CPU, memory, drivers for hardware, etc?)

And are there any other cool gadgets I should lust after while I'm about it?


Edit: Wireless stuff as well. My current laptop is 802.11b. I'd quite like to get a 802.11g router but am not sure whether its worth it and whether there are any issues with those that do both (eg can they only do one at a time or can they support both b and g devices simultaneously? I've no idea personally... :)

Second edit: I'm getting cable so the router/wireless thing in doesn't want ADSL and I suspect in fact that having ADSL on it would confuse the hell out of it (since I expect it will assume that to be the internet connection and thus not do nat elsewhere).