Linux firewalls

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Right-o, a bit of background.

Back when I was still an Ubuntu sheep, I downloaded Firestarter to put some protection on my machine. Never was able to get it installed - missing C compiler.

Since Ubuntu f****** sucks, I then whipped out the faithful Slackware 10.2 - it's about the only distro which runs decently on the old PIII I use for the Internet. Fedora refuses to boot X because of a lack of memory, I have yet to get Gentoo to work correctly with my screen and FINALLY being able to start X, and I'm NOT going back to being an Ubuntu sheep - as opposed to them, relying heavily on the shell doesen't bother me the slightest bit, I don't mind scratching my head instead of having everything done for me, and to me, GUIs are bloated clutter that should be kept to a strict minimum.

Following the initial Slackware installation, I installed and compiled some additional programs I wanted, and browing on my flash drive, I stumbled upon Firestarter, which I had honestly totally forgotten about.

Anyway, I tried my luck installing it. This time, the C compiler WAS installed. Whipping out the good old compiling routine (./configure, make, make install), I started with the configuration, and I get an error about gconftool2 (or something like that.)

After some googling, it turns out that Firestarter is for GNOME, and that the missing tool is related to the GNOME desktop, which I do not have (much less want) - it was not listed in the list of packages, and I only installed Xfce anyway.

I'll be blunt - I *hate* GNOME, and I'd rather work in pure shell mode than deal with GNOME. Same goes for KDE.

So basically, I'm looking for other firewall options that doesen't require the f****** GNOME or KDE. I don't mind putting some effort into the configuration, as long as it doesen't take an eternity, say, like installing Gentoo from the minimal install CD.

 

Personnaly, I don't like software firewalls much. I prefer to just put a router, which serves basically the same function, and is easier and uses less resources (read none).

Btw, indeed, Ubuntu doesn't come with a compiler installed. But you can just install the package build-essentials to have it installed.

Now, concerning firestarter, it says here that it should work with xfce. The sources you have of firestarter, do they come from the site of firestarter? Namely http://www.fs-security.com/.

 

Firestarter is simply a frontend to manage the netfilter/iptables framework which is a part of the Linux kernel. So instead of using a separate frontend/software to control it, you could make an iptables shell script that gets loaded on startup. It is fairly easily done, unless you need a massive policy which is constantly changing. There are several guides available on the net and there are probably guides on the distro's forum as well.

If you do not want to make a script, then you could perhaps try Shorewall to manage iptables, it should be fairly decent. It does not have a GUI either though.