[TriLUG] Network Recommendation Question (could be OT, depending on how you look at it...)

[Randy Barlow]

So I'm moving into a new house and I want to put my desktop Gentoo 
system in a location that is going to be far from the cable modem.  I 
really don't want to run cables through the house, which leaves me with 
two options that I can think of (any more would be appreciated...).

Option 1: My roommate has a Netgear router that will be carrying 
internet connectivity.  I could buy a PCI wireless card for the desktop 
and set it up to connect to this router.  Any recommendations on Linux 
friendly PCI wireless cards?  Is it going to be a pain to configure it 
to work with WPA?

Option 2: I have the famous Linksys WRT54G (wish I had the s...)  Would 
it be difficult to set up OpenWRT in "bridged" mode (is that the term 
for what I want to do here?) and get it to connect to my roommate's 
netgear router, and then just plug my Gentoo system into one of the 
ports on the back of my router?  Has anyone (in TriLUG) done this 
specific configuration before?  There's a note that's about 2 lines long 
on the OpenWRT docs, and I really didn't know what it was talking 
about.  As it is, I have Linksys firmware running now.  Another question 
I have is: How easy would it be to revert to the Linksys firmware if 
things didn't work out so well?

So which option seems best?

Randy