If you have a supported wireless AP or gateway and want to have fun extending it without getting too deep into building software, give dd-wrt a try.
I have a collection of Linksys wireless junk, enough that I should consider becoming a stock holder. When we moved into this house I was thinking of running cables from the basement up to the 2nd floor. But this house does not have a simple means to run cable from the basement to the attic and I really don’t want to punch holes in the walls.
So I setup a Linksys WAP54G in the basement, another WAP54G in the guest room, and a WET54GS5 on my second floor where Lily and my computers are. Eventually I purchased a WRT54G v5 and replaced the WAP54G in the basement. I think I wanted to play with the idea of using the WRT54G as a replacement for my Linux gateway. The old WAP55G got put away on the shelf.
The second floor WET54GS5 was a 5 port switch bridge; it seemed like a good idea at the time. The thing is simple to setup but it spontaneously reboots often and support for it is really non-existent. It’s a dead end product.
The shelved WAP54G only has 8MB of RAM and 2MB FLASH which in the past excluded it from hacking. Now the website www.dd-wrt.com has a replacement firmware v2.3 SP2 micro image which fits and is a stripped down. Using these instructions, I installed the image on the WRT54G v5. It works really well and I’ve replaced the 5 port switch bridge with the WRT54G.
On the WRT54G the WAN connection is now configured as just another LAN port. I configured the device as a “Client Bridge” and connect it to the AP in the basement. At the WRT Wiki is a pretty good description of how to set it up. It’s been running without a hiccup for over two weeks now. My game consoles, the laptops, etc. all work fine.