Cleve, It sounds like you and I are about at the same place in our Linux experience. I too am on the verge of completely dumping Window$ from both of my machines and becoming 100% Window$ free, especially after XP CRASHED last evening (Yeah sure, XP doesn't crash. RRRRIIIIIGGGGGHHHHHTTTT! and it crashed to the extent that all it would do is hang up after it got well into to the boot cycle. Required a TOTAL reinstall.) and I still don't have everything back up and working properly even though I spent over 4 hours last night just reloading drivers and software.
To echo what John H said, Rute's Tutorial is GREAT! I downloaded the PDF version, printed it all out (NO small task) and am about half way through it, with spot reads of some of the latter sections for specific pieces of information. I also found The Linux Cookbook to be quite good as well. I have PDF files of both of these on a CD if you want a copy. If you want to look at either of them in printed form, I can bring them to the meeting on Monday nite. It is Monday nite, right John?.....:) If you are unable to find programs under Linux to replace all of the Window$ ones, I suggest you give Wine a try. Again, it is no small task to get it working properly and to understand its configuration, but it is worth the effort. I have it successfully running on my AMD 500 box under Mandrake 9. I downloaded the rpm from Codeweavers, installed it and have been running MixMeiser (its a DJ style beat mixing program that I haven't been able to find a suitable replace for yet) with about 99.5% success. There are a couple of things that don't work quite right but I have been able to figure out work arounds for them so it is nothing more than a minor annoyance at this point. I have also successfully run a number of other Window$ apps under it, just for grins, including PowerPoint, Paint, Notepad, and WordPad to name a few. I initially went to www.winehq.org and downloaded the source for the latest release there and attempted a compile, but was unsuccessful and since I didn't completely understand the errors that the compiler reported, I just dropped back to the binary from Codeweavers. This has been accomplished with very few trips to the shell (yeah, I know some you don't want to hear that.....hehehe) and, if I knew when I started, what I know now, I could have done it all from the desktop. I am running KD3 3. > >I can install various distributions, set up email, networking, printing, > >etc......but I'm not really there yet because I don't understand the file > >system, and I don't know what tools are available to me at the terminal > >prompt. > >You may wanna try installing Gentoo for the experience, or especially the >Linux From Scratch project. These will give you a good feeling for how the >kernel and filesystem work on a Linux box. Rute's has a really good section on the Unix file structure and the logic behind it. I would also suggest that you work through the tutorials that are in it. They are very well done and not "distro specific". You will get a lot of "hands on" experience with the shell and most of the Linux commands. Ed Richards An oldie but a GNUbie too.
