Best Firewalls?
 

Newbie running Mandrake 9.1 on a standalone, dual-boot PC.

I tried the firewall native to Mandrake, and surprise!, I managed to cut off my browser from the Web, despite checking ALL options to "ON".

Anybody have a better firewall? I am assuming I need one, so I should ask... do I?

No, I'm not THAT much of a newbie that I would surf the net while logged in as ROOT.

Best way is to write (or borrow someone else's) iptables script.
If you don't want to do that you could try KMyfirewall which will create the script for you.

Yup. There are many good ones, but my two favourites are Guarddog and Firestarter. Both are easy to set up and use. One quick note, take 15 or 20 minutes and READ the set up information. Especially with Guarddog.

Also as suggested, you could write your own iptables. The above are really only "front-ends" to write your scripts for you. I think you can find a bunch of very good suggestions for scripts in the security forums.

Make a script for iptables. It's the best. I've tried some guis but they don't give you never know what the program really is doing. This page has all the info you need.

http://www.linuxguruz.com/iptables/