[Gloucs] Out and about with Linux

[Paul Broadhead]

Hi folks,

I'm away with work at the moment but I've taken a laptop running debian
with me.  I'm paying an extortionate price for a very slow (high speed
Internet connection) so I thought I'd use it to talk to you.  Anyway, I
have a (debian ish) question and a bit of sadness to share.

This laptop has always lived behind my local network firewall.  Now its
all on its own in the big wide world and it needs protection.  I setup a
very basic firewall that I hope is enough.  Can any of you
debian/iptables experts advise as to if this is enough:

  iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -m state --state ESTABLISH,RELATED -j ACCEPT
  iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -j LOG
  iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -j DROP

This appears to make me invisible but I'd be happy for advice.

Now the sadness, of the embarrassing kind:

On the plane over here I couldn't resist booting the laptop.  All the
others were using some toy operating system, but I was using our beloved
Linux.  I wanted to download some pictures from my camera but a recent
kernel update had changed something.  I had to edit my download script. 
As a result I think I might form the "vi high club".  Anyone else
already a member?

Now the real depth of my sadness.  My colleague and I went out to the
cinema and saw "Scary Movie 3", OK, that was bad enough but I'm not
there yet.  We're in the U.S.A. and the mall we went to was, of course,
enormous.  It had a Walmark store so I thought, hey, they sell Linux
PCs.  I was driving so my colleague had no choice.  We walked around the
store for ten minutes but I could not find any Linux PCs.  Food, Guns,
Tyres, Halloween hats for your dog, but no Linux PCs.  I was very
disappointed.

Before I go, has anyone else heard about the Barbie Linux distro?  It's
got to be a wind up, surely!  See linuxtoday.com link to
<URL:http://qrxx.4t.com/barbieOS.htm>.

Regards,
Paul