Be sure to read Boost your internet speed part I

I am writing this post because a reader of this site has suggested.

Polipo is a Linux proxy, like squid but it is intended in a personal use, I used to use squid as my personal proxy but because I have a PIV HT processor and 1 Gig of RAM, in Laptop that approach was just to heavy for it.

Now with Polipo things will change, well go to the installation.

Installation

apt-get install polipo

There is almost no need to change the configuration file as with the defaults it will work great as a personal firewall.

But if you are configuring it as you home proxy, you can change these lines on the file /etc/polipo/config

proxyAddress = "0.0.0.0"    # IPv4 only

allowedClients = 127.0.0.1, 192.168.42.0/24

be sure to change 192.168.42.0/24 for your own IP address range, in general no further changes are needed.

Firefox configuration

Go to Edit->Preferences->

On this screen:

Select Advanced and then click on setting, then:

Select "Manual proxy configuration" and enter the IP of the PC where polipo is installed and enter the port which is: 8123

Gnome configuration

Go to Desktop->preferences->Network Proxy

And Select "Manual Proxy Configuration" and also here enter the IP of the PC where Polipo installed and the port 8123

Opera Configuration

Go to Tools->preferences, and once on this screen

Now select Advance and click on Network and then on Proxy Servers.

And once again enter the IP and port of your polipo server.

As a final step you can configure your apt if you are using Debian or Ubuntu, I always do, that way my Laptop gets its updated really fast as usually my Desktop have already downloaded them.

Apt Configuration to work with proxy

vi /etc/apt/apt.conf

And add this line

Acquire::http::Proxy "http://127.0.0.1:8123";

be sure to change the IP to the one that corresponds to your Polipo server.