Our Linksys wrt54g router at home started acting up the other day.  My wife's web site had problems delivering image galleries.  We'd get about 4 thumbnails downloaded and then the connections seem to go away and the page would never completely load in the browser.  I couldn't find the exact problem but I managed to determine it was basically a router issue.  Before running out and buying another one I decided to try my hand at upgrading the firmware to an open source firmware distribution for this device. 

There are a number of open source options for WRT54G firmware.  I opted for the DD-WRT version.  I won't go into a lot of detail on how I did it – there is a really good step by step instruction from Ken McFarrin in the thread I started on the Boulder Linux User's Group mailing list – but I can say it was a painless process (far simpler than getting Windows running under vmware) and it solved the problem.  We're not having any problems viewing the image galleries on my wife's site anymore.

If you're looking for more information on this router, here are some other useful links I found while researching this process:

http://www.wi-fiplanet.com/tutorials/article.php/3562391
http://wiki.openwrt.org/
http://www.dd-wrt.com/dd-wrtv2/index.php
http://www.linksysinfo.org/index.php
http://www.wrt54g.net/