Monitoring Trafic through a Gateway?

Wow, this has been quite a challenge. 4weeks ago I began having wireless issues, 
which eventually, now only 1 of my 2 AT&T Uverse boxes work, and my Apple TV is 
spiratic. Several techs figured out these devices work when my Linux desktop 
machine is disconnected from the gateway. At our LUG a gentleman suggested I run 
"mrtg" as a cron job, but he says it produces pritty graphs, which some1 would 
need to look at. So I looked through Debian package for items related with 
routers. I tried installing the following, but had some errors:
sudo aptitude install libpath-router-perl libr3-0 librouter-simple-perl 
roger-router-cli smcroute
Back again live: So can some1 please inform, are their simpler ways of grabbing 
a text output of trafic running through this Gateway? This router I can access 
with 192.168.1.254  but in elinks I can actually login, but in L Y N X I can 
just have a basic view. Thanks in advance for any suggestions, as I really need 
to fix this so all these items run at the same time.
Hart