[Nottingham] complete beginner

[Duncan John Fyfe]

On Thu, 3 Apr 2003, Terry Devlin wrote:

> To the experts
> I'm new to Linux and have it safely installed on my system for word
> processing etc. My problem is using it for the internet. I would love to
> use it so I can escape the blue wall of death but I struugle with having a
> firewall installed. On windows I just install Zone Alarm but configuring a
> firewall on Linux seems to involve having a separate machine or copying a
> whole load of script into a programme. Am I missing out on something? Can
> anyone recommend a good linux for idiots book?
>
>

Just to add to what everyone else has said...
A separate machine is nice but not necessary.

To help you further, what distro have you installed ?

Also, if you do 'uname -r' from a terminal and post the result
eg from this machine:

prompt> uname -r
2.4.7-10

it would help.
Specifically a 2.2.x kernel has a different (ipchains) firewall
to a 2.4.x kernel (iptables).

Have fun,
Duncan

-- 
Duncan John Fyfe          X-ray Astronomy Group,
                          Dept. of Physics & Astronomy,
Phone +44 116 252 3635    University of Leicester,
E-mail djf@star.le.ac.uk  University Road,
                          Leicester, LE1 7RH, U.K.