Re:jump right in (Score 1)

I have to agree with you about jumping right in. My first experience with Linux was installing Mandrake 8 on my HP Pavillion Laptop computer. While the installer made the process very easy, it still didnt help the fact that Mandrake didnt (on it's own) offer support for half of the hardware in my machine. Because I really didnt know that much about what I was doing, and because in trying to make things work using Mandrake's GUI config's, I usually ended up making things worse, not better, I gave in and scrapped Mandrake. My recent experiences were quite a bit better though. I ordered Debian on cd and and installed just a basic Command Line debian environment in dual boot with Windows XP (seeing as I only have one machine). From there, A friend of mine showed me the wonders of recompiling the kernel, and like that, I had all of my hardware (or at least all of it I cared about) working. Then, I installed XFree86, Installed WindowMaker, and before long, I had a very usefull Linux system. Whenever I ran into problems with something, I would just boot back to Windows, go to google, and do some reading about how other people did what I need to do, and then it's back to Linux to try to make it work for me. There is a real sense of pride in having a Linux system running that you've played a great role in making work. I still find, that even though I have text editors installed for WindowMaker, I much prefer to jump back to command line and use their editors if i need to edit a config file or do something like that. Even newbies need to know where the real power in Linux is, the command line. If your Windows Install bites it, most likely your going to have to reinstall windows. Not very often you can come back. In linux, if X stops working, you've still got the command line (which is where I started out), so, your not totally lost. X will generally give you a reason why it cant start, so, you just fix the problem, and your good to go again. But, enough from me. I just thought I'd give the input of a newbie who dived right into the command line, albeit with a safety rope on (my Windows Install still intact). Maybe it's just the geek in me, but I think we should try to understand what's running under X (the command line) before we play with X.