I used to do it in V5, but there were some annoyances:
1. Astaro doesn't support USB NICs (for good reasons), so you had to have a PCI wifi card, or a supported PCMCIA adapter.
2. having a wifi card with a tiny antenna on the back of a steel PC does not make for good reception/range. I added an external antenna to my NIC, but it soon broke off
3. VERY FEW cards can run as an AP in INFRASTRUCTURE mode. Astaro5 only supported Prism cards, iirc, as they were about all that worked with the hostap drivers. Many cards can work in AdHoc mode, but that is pretty worthless.
3. WPA is only recently fully supported by most drivers, and I doubt that hostap supports it.
4. The wifi driver models keep changing in the linux kernel. Although this is good for wifi clients, as more cards and features are supported, it makes it hard to keep a server/fw distro up-to-date.
I finally got a WRT54G and am using that in WPA2 mode. The only annoyance I have right now is that the LAN side of the AP doesn't have a gateway, so you can only admin it from the wifi DMZ. Flashing the AP with a real firmware (e.g. ddwrt) would probably help.
You might want to look at ddwrt, etc., if you need features that aren't available in the off-the-shelf router firmwares. If so, you should get one of the APs with extra RAM, e.g. the WRT54GS or WRT54GL.
