[ale] "New" laptop with Ubuntu

[Thompson Freeman]

I get to go out of town to start grandpappy duties next  
week, so I treated myself to a used ThinkPad T22 and loaded  
Ubuntu onto it over the weekend. So far, I'm quite  
impressed with the system as the developers have shown the  
restraint that this system needs and not thrown the kitchen  
sink at it. Nice and clean.

However, I'm running out of time to get the last few items  
straightened out. I'm starting to run out of time for  
google supported trial and error.

Most worrysome is a firewall. So far, I've been playing  
around behing my firewalled router, so no big deal. While  
I'd love to have a high dollar, hand crafted, optimized set  
of rules for this thing, I'll settle for a configuration  
tool which is cheap and quick, sort of like the default  
system the Fedora installer runs up. Any opinions from the  
Ubuntu enthusiasts here?

The other big challenge is to get wireless cleaned up.  
Since I don't use wireless here at home, the skills are a  
little shakey. I _think_ I've gotten a NetGear MA111 usb  
dongle properly recognized and ready to configure. What I'd  
like next is a nice little browser to search for access  
points rather like my little Nokia 770 has.

Those are the two items I _really_ want to get straight  
before I get going.

Thanks in advance for your attention and help. And I  
apreciate the loan of everybody's bandwidth