Thanks for the posts.

I obviously did not make myself clear. Perhaps I should have titled my post Newbies, What are your experiences of Linux? As Subarus hinted in his last paragraph, I dual boot with Windows XP. I use XP to get my work done and Linux when I have the time to battle with it. I was just wondering if other newbies spend their time trawling the net for answers?

At first look, Knoppix is a great piece of software and Knoppix.net is simple to navigate and well laid out but after attracting newbies with a great CD what a shame, for example, that the Knoppix install to hard disk howto does not take that little bit of extra time to explain what ssh, samba, send mail etc are so a Newbie knows how to answer the Do you want this service to run at boot questions that are asked during the network setup and if you change your mind, you can change the services that are run at startup by logging on and doing so and so...

With Knoppix the only issue I need to get up and running is my wireless pcmcia network card but I know how to do this because I spent two weeks on and off sorting it out in Mandrake. I needed hotplug just to get my USB mouse working to save my trak pad! Oh and why are printers such a pain in Linux? I had to load modules to get my parallel port working with Mandrake and then I finally got my Canon BJ200 to work on my wireless print server when I discovered that the dip switch was set to Epson LQ mode and not BJ mode!

Stephen, you say ssh is a secure way... but is that another computer on the same network or over the internet? Does the other computer have to be running Linux and ssh? In short, I don't think I need it.