I'm very impressed with Firestarter, but would like to add and drop some rules depending on what I'm doing. My actual goal is to attach scripts containing the rules related to certain programs to the starting and stopping of those programs.

Using an 'iptables -A INPUT ...' command, I can see the rule is displayed in an 'INPUT' chain, but when I add the rule using Firestarter's GUI, It gets added to an 'INBOUND' chain. (I suppose the 'INBOUND' chain is a user defined chain initialized by Firestarter. Problem is, my 'iptables -A INPUT ...' command does not work, and using the GUI does. I tried changing my command to 'iptables -A INBOUND ...', but that generates an error.

Any suggestions?

you should be able to change iptables whever irrespective of firestarter, but last time i used it, firestarter uses it's own fixed startup script, so each reload of firestarter will nuke any external changes you made to it. no biggy though, i'm sure.

as far as the error, i'd have to assume that you're using the wrong syntax... what IS the error? you could always make that change in firestarter, and diff the before and after versions of firstarters config to see what's actually been changed and what the iptables command it actually uses is. After all, that's all it is... just a command wrapper.