On my university I can plugin my laptop to surf but every time I start my browser I have to authenticate (username password) and I am not able use messenger, skype and download programs. Is there some way to set up a proxy to authenticate ?

What are you wanting to achieve? If you supply the username/password, surely you can then access the internet fine from the apps in question?!? The proxy that you are authenticating with is why you cannot use messenger because chances are these ports are blocked. Skype should work as it operates over port 80 (http) - of course, provided that you get it to authenticate.

set up my network to use a local proxy on my laptop which does all the authentication so I don't have to do this per application and opera gets stuck when it has many tabs open with many different servers I have to okay them all....

In Gnome, there is a network settings app from what I remember where you can give Network proxy settings (Computer/Desktop Preferences/Network Proxy) that all apps should then use this. You wouldn't I don't think be able to do this by installing squid proxy on your laptop.

You can also do it from the command prompt by:



replacing the username/password and host with ip address and port to connect to the proxy.

which port would they use, 80?

Normally, a proxy would use port 8080, but squid defaults to 3128. This can depend on how they set up their network. I've just been googling to find out how you could see what port your browser had picked up for the automatically detected proxy settings. Not found anything yet though.

If using Firefox, try using about:config and filtering on proxy and see if it shows any address/port settings here. If it does, then you'll have the info you need to configure. Just an idea I had.