What is a good, simple, user-friendly OS for this application?
I have a new little system built to use as a firewall/router machine. It has an old 60gig HDD with a new Gigabyte GA-C847N-D miniITX mobo and 2gig RAM. I want to put this little puppy between the modem and the store-bought router I have. It's a Linksys. I need to keep the router for the wireless signal for an old laptop and new satellite TV system. I had originally intended this to run Smoothwall, but that has a rather steep learning curve that I didn't foresee. What do you folks suggest?
If you don't want to use pfsense m0n0wall and smoothwall are both pretty good alternatives. But i would still recommend pfsense, it looks very complex and etc but once you have a bit of time to adapt it turns into the most useful and comprehensive of the open source router systems.
the only thing is through put of the pfSense. If you have a fast internet connection and a few devices behind the firewall, throughput could be an issue.
Fortunately that's really not an issue with this person's setup. The frequency of the CPU on their mobo is specified as 1.1 GHz, which according to the chart you referenced is good for up to 200 Mbps throughput. You'd need REALLY fast internet for that to be your bottleneck.
Thanks for the chart though, I hadn't seen that before!
all you would need to do is buy a new motherboard, ram and a cpu. Most motherboards come with gigabit Ethernet. You would need to buy another Gigabit NIC. Shouldn't run much over $90 if that.