Sorry about all the gobbledygook! Rather than Ubuntu, perhaps you’d better try a more newbie-friendly, KDE-based distribution like Mepis or SUSE for now (or even Debian 3.1 which is a whole lot easier to install than the previous version and comes with almost every application known to humankind in 14 CD’s, but you’ll be good to go with just 2 CDs). However, I should add that part of the fascination of working with Linux comes from finding out more about the technical stuff…Be patient and do some reading. That's what I did. I've been using Linux for a little over a year now, and no way am I going back to MICROCRAP (now I sound like a linux-nut).