The idea here is to own your own hotspot 100%, no one else involved.

We developed the WiFi Gator project to do just that.
All of the other links above point you to revenue sharing hotspots which misses the point of this tutorial which is to roll and own your own hotspot.

Over at dd-wrt.com we are the driving force behind the chillidog thread, we have taken the best of chillispot and wifidog. We took that development and created a hotspot management system that has almost every feature that worldspot and sputnik boasts.

We have a live DVD, just boot it up and click "install" Then reboot from the harddrive, everything you need is now up and running. point your routers chilispot to the IP of your new server and there you have your captive portal.

Supports unlimited hotspots, assign multiple paypal accounts to individual hotspots, Create batches of prepaid tickets with the hotspots logo (displayed in a dynamic PDF for accurate printing), Excel generated reports for prepaid ticket activity, Individually set up each hotspots payment plans(Time and prices). Every hotspot landing page has a web based wysiwyg editor.

You own it, You keep all the money, check it out at WiFiGator.com

We have worked out the bugs and added many features. Setting up a world class hotspot is not easy and the response we have gotten in the past few months that we released this has been overwhelmingly positive.

Cheers
Loren