I don't mind about a/b/g/n, I just need something hackable with enough CPU power to carry for example a torrent seed, USB (native or with hw mods on the motherboard) it's important for me to attach external storage. Even a low power pc wastes too much energy when compared to a cheap device. In this moment I'm focusing on DSL linksys devices (DGNB2200 for example), it's a .N device with DSL modem builtin and it seems quite hacker friendly for running Linux on it

I'm looking for a 802.11a/b/g/n (no matter what) wireless router with an USB port as well, 802.11n is even too fast for me, what I'm looking for is just a friendly hackable router for attaching some storage, a PC is even too big for a home network cheap nas. I did it in the past with few Linksys and Buffalo APs, what I'm searching now it's just something to replace my current: DSL router, AP, NAS

In your linux installation there're different components (software) involved in your network booting.

PXE: on the client side (your desktop PCs)
DHCP Server: on your host side, it gives you IP addresses
TFTP Server: this is what you've not mentioned, the TFTP server is responsable for providing a boot image to your clients through the Trivial File Transfer Protocol (TFTP)

DHCP itself provides only a valid ip address, then you've a kernel image loaded through the TFTP Server (still in your linux host), they work as a couple and they're responsable for network booting
When your client pc receives the ip address and the boot image it's ready to go and get more information from your Linux Server (mounting NFS drives or whatever it needs)
Your client tries to locate PXE boot servers with DHCP services available and tries to locate a tftp server with a valid boot image for its platform (x86 in your case I guess), that's why you've a bootable machine with a valid kernel, maybe your router does not provide TFTP server information (not configured, not available at all, ...) so your client parse every dhcp response to find the valid one, please remember: it's still a bad thing to have two dhcp services available in the same piece of network !
But that's the reason why you've your machines happy with a linux kernel loaded, take a look at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preboot_Execution_Environment , it's not the holy bible but it's a nice place to start; then study deeply how PXE works and you'll discover it's a really interesting service due to it's simplicity (not on the server configuration I mean !!!)

Hope it helps
Ben

Also limit max processes and threads per user so a fake process or bomb cannot freeze your system.
I don't mean from Apache, but from the kernel itself.

I wanted an UNIX operating system for myself, I've always loved mainframes but I didn't had access to any of them back in the '90s and there were no such choice for a low specs x86 machine like mine.
I didn't had access to big irons and my cheap 386sx machine didn't had a coprocessor and a MMU so BSD wasn't available for me in these days (sigh). I've started with Linux because it was "free" and I've decided to test it carefully. now in 2011 I'm still here writing in a linux site, guess what happened in between :-) ?

Ben

Have you installed Suse from scratch or is it just an upgrade from a previous version ? it may be a conf file around.
Have you tried to enable/disable compiz and gnome appearance to see the difference ?