Not a direct answer to your question (I'm in 'old' England - too far from Northern Virginia ); until/unless you get some one-to-one tuition you might want to look at the latest Sidux as well. This has, like Knoppix, the 'clarity' of being based on 'pure' Debian which IMHO has the best packaging system, and I find it needs fewer configuration 'tweaks' than the more recent Knoppix releases. On the other hand, once you get used to working 'under the hood' , problem solving is a way of being forced to learn about the system, albeit in an unstructured way. Good luck anyway .