Have some old hardware lying around? Odds are you do – and it’s not being put to good use. You’re also probably stuck behind a consumer-level router that’s not doing your broadband Internet connection much justice.

You might not have thought about it before, but that router is a special-purpose computer. It might even be running a flavor of Linux. But in the quest for profit (and ease of use, as we’ll see) the power of your regular router is without-a-doubt inferior to even Pentium II era hardware.

Read on to learn how the Debian Linux distribution can easily be turned into a Linux router in matter of a few hours.