you don't "lose" your computer to any os unless there's some sort of hardware drm that locks in (there isn't last time i checked, but who knows with vista comps). if you're that worried about it, you can literally buy the oldest cheapest hd you can find, swap out your current one for the one you just bought, and install linux on it -- when you want to go back to what you had, just swap the hd's again and it'd be like nothing happened. also, dual booting would be useless in the case of a router, since you'd want to leave that router on non-stop. even if you just overwrite the original hard drive with linux, you can always overwrite linux with windows again... backup your stuff and it's risk free.
ever since the whole novell microsoft partnership, suse has a pretty low reputation in the general linux community, and as far as i've seen, professional suse has yet to become more interoperable with windows, and vice versa, as was promised. also, if major gpl projects switch to gpl v3, commercial suse simply will die. i don't know what'll happen with opensuse, though... either way, suse in general is not a guaranteed safe bet.
Ryo wrote:
This is getting very off topic
You could use Fli4l, a out of the box realy simpe to setup/install Linux for use as Router. You dont even have to know anything about linux to use it.
http://www.fli4l.de/en/home/
eh... gigabane is the one with the questions, and is the one who started the topic...
i've also heard some good stuff about
smoothwall. also doesn't need any linux knowledge to install and use -- you control it entirely through a remote java gui. but it is first and foremost a firewall... i don't know if it has good capabilities/configurability as a router.
Ryo wrote:
Im using Linux on a PIII 450 underclocked to 300 Mhz, 128Meg of Ram, 3 NIC's, ISA-Graphiccard and a 1Gig HDD as router.
The hole computer draw 24Watt by full Bandwithusage (with HDD-Standby)
that's a lot lower than i imagined... very cool.
there are also some arm-based motherboard/cpu combos that are the size of a thumb and use 3 watts max. not a lot of computing power, but enough for a router and that combo only costs about $99 USD (though a premade case to house it isn't cheap -- better off building your own).
GiGaBaNE wrote:
thanks...
how the hell would i set up a PC as a wireless router? i have too many machines spread around the house to go fully wired.
in many cases (on linux), it's not much harder than setting up a purely ethernet one.
