What is the best software firewall?
 

I have heard good things about firestarter. What do you all recommend?

http://search.tucows.com/search?sear...tail_id=5&ref=
Falcon firewall project, gshield etc....with their user ratings.

If you're a newbie Firestarter is great... does the whole bit for you..
http://firestarter.sourceforge.net

You'll quickly move on if you have an eye for that sort of thing.. IPTables just sounds scarey... it's not really. Have a look for jays-firewall that might be a good starting place for you if your a command line officionado!

firestarter and others are not the firewall themselfs like in windows and other os s they just sets up the firewall for you they use iptables which is linux s own firewall they just configure it for you.

True, I use monmotha's IPTables firewall script. it implements masquerading and basic security using iptables. It is easily configurable by modifying the options near the beginning and does not need to be rerun every time your IP address changes, making it perfect for users with dialup connections. Many features such as limited flood protection, TTL mangling, port forwarding, and MAC address based matching are available.

http://monmotha.mplug.org/firewall/index.php

You can also try Shorewall.
http://www.shorewall.net/

But if you want to learn about iptables, go to Netfilter
http://www.netfilter.org/