Building a harden laptop help

I'm wish to build a hardened Suse 7.3 on my two laptops. But I haven't got much of an idea of where to start after making sure the; 1. bios is up-to-date 2. bios password is set 3. Partitions are freshly created & formatted 1. What secure FS I should use? Stegfs? 2. Should I set /home/user as encrypted? 2. Of Gnome or KDE which environment I should use? Is there any security reason for either to be chosen over the other. 3. The blocking & stealthing of the ports I will leave open, http(s) POP3, SSH, for home use, outbound connections only. 4. Telnet ,Ftp, IKE for connecting to work . Help on this matter would be gratefully appreciated Dre