Hello ppl,

just to introduce myself: I have beend fiddling around with linux more or less for severall years now, but it never came to more than testing different distros, recognizing they were not perfect and skiiping to the next. So I have a basic linux knowledge, not specialized in any distro and I know how to use the man command and how to look up things in a book I use my laptop for surfing, emailing, (sometimes I need to send an email from a local mailserver) web design ( good xhtml / php editor with syntax highlighting needed) and office working.

Now I will tell you what I did:

Used a knoppix 3.4 livecd booted my laptop (sony vaio pcg grx 416) and tested the hardware. Everything was working out of the box, even ACPI seemed to be ok. So I did a hd install (debian like). I used a 9 gb partition formated with reiserfs and a 1gb part as swap. I then used apt-get update and apt-get upgrade / apt-get dist-upgrade so now I have the most up to date packsges. I installed synaptic and used that to get the unstable versions of packages I was keen on seing / testing the latest versions of. Used Bastille to make system more hardened, also shutted down daemons I did not need like fetchmail, sendmail, whatever


What I want / need help with:
- what are the most common guis for administrative tasks like: configure different settings, etc
- is there an equivalent for a windows - like gui firewall? what should I use? I have to add I know about protocols, ports and so on, I guess I could use a command line firewall as well if there is a good documentation for it.
- how can I see / solve problems occuring at boottime? when I start up I see various errors / failures but they flash by too fast to catch them - where can I look up the logfile craeted during boottime? would anyone help me fix those errors?
- what knoppix specific tools / applications can / should I remove? I want to get rid of unneeded things like the knoppix : configure swap file - this does not make any sense with my hd install


well, thats all that comes to mind - I'll be back for sure with more