How do I set up a wi-fi bridge?

[Da_Nuke]

While this is not exactly a Gentoo problem, I feel like it's Linux-general enough to be discussed here. I have a netbook with Arch Linux and Windows XP Home Edition, and a desktop computer with Arch Linux and Windows 7 Professional.

Some time ago I used to connect to the internet on my desktop computer with a wi-fi PCI card, a Realtek RTL8185, associated to my 2Wire ADSL modem (the one issued to Telmex's Prodigy Infinitum subscribers). However, I later found out that this card doesn't works under any Linux on my computer (I tried Ubuntu, Debian, Parted Magic, openSUSE and Fedora, none of them worked) because the drivers make my system hang, so I removed it altogether and started using my laptop as a wireless-to-Ethernet bridge via Windows's own network bridging, so far with p. good results.

Now, because Windows XP is a pretty heavy OS compared to Arch Linux, I'd really like to do the same thing under Linux. Problem is, I found out that bridge-utils won't let me do that, all the guides I find are for creating an access point (which is literally the opposite of what I need, which is bridging an existing SSID with an Ethernet port), and the only similar post I've seen in this forum is from 10 years ago. This leaves me with no clue as to what should I do.

NATing my desktop computer is the last choice because I once did this with Vyatta on VirtualBox and it worked fine for 10 minutes, then Telmex's god-awful internet gateway decided to stop routing towards my virtualized NAT, and I really don't want to tinker with my gateway's configuration because I live with my family and I know that doing so will uncork at least a week of "Da_Nuke, fix the internet!", "Da_Nuke, Facebook won't load!", "Da_Nuke, there's no internet!" and things of that nature.

I already posted this question to Linuxquestions.org, so far 171 people have read it and don't know what to do.

[Ant P.]

emerge hostapd and add it and net.wlan0 to the default runlevel, ensure the kernel has the bridge module, set bridge= in /etc/hostapd/hostapd.conf, and add modules_wlan0="!wireless" to /etc/conf.d/net.

[PaulBredbury]

You should have made your waffle clearer. You want to put Linux on the *desktop*, right?

Staying away from distro-specific stuff, I suppose you would want to set up the route, e.g.:

[Da_Nuke]

[John R. Graham]

Arch? Moved from Networking & Security to Unsupported Software.

- John
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