Firestarter says I'm not connected to the internet

[Dave M G]

Ubuntu Users.

    I'm still on a quest to get some kind of decent P2P application going.
  
    I've abandoned MLDonkey in favour of aMule.

    When reading online instructions on getting a highID, I came across 
the advice that one should install Firestarter firewall to get control 
of port forwarding.

    But as soon as I set up port 4662 to be mapped to my local IP, I got 
this message:

Failed to start Firewall.  An unkown error occured. Please check your 
network device settings, and make sure your internet connection is active.

    Somewhere, something is stopping me from getting a decent connection 
out to any P2P networks. Could this error have anything to do with that?

    Any advice would be much appreciated.

--
Dave M G