No, I'm not a criminal, here the term hacker (computing) is used in the context of a home computing enthusiast. I first picked up a WRT54G (Version 2) a number of years ago and being a keen Linux enthusiast quickly started upgrading the firmware to one of the derivatives that had been developed after Linksys released their source code (which they hadn't initially done, but were obliged to release it under the terms of the GNU GPL.
These really are brilliant routers, or perhaps more accurately the firmware that has been developed is excellent. Impressed with the WRT54G I opted to purchase a NSLU2 when I wanted to expand my network storage, and that too has been a delight to use. I've also purchased a second WRT54G (version 1.1) to play around with.
I opted initially to install Gentoo on an external hard-drive. Unfortunately the arm arch under Gentoo didn't seem to be maintained as often as other archs so I dropped it in favour of SlugOS BE on an external Hard-drive.