[Hampshire] Routing traffic

Hi,

I have a wireless router at home which I connect to using my laptop and
network manager on Ubuntu 7.10.

I have a PC running debian etch which I'd like to connect to the same
network via the ethernet card in my laptop and a crossover cable. This
is where I become lost.

The wireless router dishes out IPs in the 192.168.1.1 - 254 (I don't
know how to do that CIDR stuff or whatever it is) range via it's built
in DHCP server, my laptop picks up one of these IPs, it'd be nice if the
Debian box transparently* picked up an IP also...as if it were plugged
directly into the router.

One thing I don't want is for the routing to be all weird, I don't want
to make the wireless router a hop when transfering large files between
the laptop and PC (wireless can be very slow for big files!)

If anything needs a static IP, that's not really a problem either.

To make it a bit clearer:

ADSL---3com_router- - -laptop---debian

--- represents a physical line
- - - represents a wireless connection

When it comes to iptables and all that kind of thing, I'm fairly lost.

If anyone can point me in the right direction, I'd be eternally
grateful!

Thanks,
John.