The good news is that I will get broadband on Monday, at least the stuff should arrive then. In fact, one reason for getting Linux was so that I could get broadband and still sleep at night.

The bad news is that I know little about firewalls and Linux virus scanners and related software. I know that some related applications come with the install. Are they reliable and relatively easy to use? Or should I look elsewhere? (I tried googling, but there are so many hits related to to Suse and it's seperate firewall product that I just couldn't find anything of value.)

SUSE Comes with a firewall, easy to configure through YaST. You'll survive without a virus scanner.

Seeya,
Finn.

I use clamav, but I had to install it from source. If you are worried, get chkrootkit too (also needs to be installed from source)

ClamAV shipped with SuSE 9.1, and will most likely ship with 9.2 (I'll tell you tomorrow). It is currently stopping roughly 350 viruses/day on our SuSE mail gateway.