NewsForge: The Online Newspaper of Record for Linux and Open Source Sputnik lets you turn an ordinary PC into a dedicated 802.11b wireless access point (WAP). In the future, Sputnik will be able to run as a daemon on Linux systems and will also support the faster (54Mbps vs. 802.11b's 11Mbps) 802.11a wireless protocol. While this GPL project is still in beta, there's enough there to see that Sputnik will achieve a successful launch.