Has anyone at Mandrake taken a look at netmasq? It's a set of scripts and text files for setting up accept/deny/block rules for a firewall. Version 2 used ipchains and version 3 uses iptables. All it takes is some basic knowledge of ip addresses and services (port numbers). I've used it for the last couple of years with my firewall (formerly RedHat based, now Mandrake 8.2 based). What's especially good about it (other than that it _works_), is that it has very low overhead - it is easy to edit the config files and it executes very quickly.
