Hello,
I am running a IPTABLES firewall written by hand with the aid of a RedHat Press book.
I run RedHat 7 & 9 machines, and always boot to just the console. I leave the graphical login client off. I use the vncserver :port -depth commands to spawn off VNC sessions while the main screen remains in a text environment. In those VNC windows, I run TWM to keep the fancy desktop off of the network... a bare-bones xterm is about it for me.
One of these days, I need to build a fedora box and see where that technology is going.
Christian