Thank you all, especially you, Cuddles. I have been reading the forum awhile and had started looking for your posts aways back. I did feel a certain linuxnoobdom kinship though I sat back and watched and read and read and did I mention read? I do RTFM, too. Trouble is so many distros, kernel flavors and conflicting info. This is where I am tripping up.

I am no longer in IT, I am more graphics employment-wise now and though I have brought up my "linuxdom" with some ex IT coworkers I get no support and in the case of a few individuals where there was mutual respect, they ridicule and "pshaw". I am the lone linuxer in my crowd

Anyhow, after the two absolute failures of installing lm sensors with apt get, I looked carefully the second try and noted only one error, literally "error 1" and a lousey email to root saying basically it lm sensors needs special devices under /dev. duh Reading through the vast amount of info about lm sensors, I came to the conclusion I should heed the warning not to try compiling against a patched kernel. So, off I began on vanilla (or unpatched) kernel compiling Sunday afternoon. Merrily I did compile, everything went a treat and than I fumbled, stumbled and blew it when asked questions about Lilo. I won't go into the gory details of Sunday night. You can read my post over at Linux questions if you are interested.

Oh, and eco2geek, I cannot tell you why alsa and lm sensors don't work with apt-get. Or why apt get install is so vague (error 1 is real helpful aint it?).

Anyway, I fixed lilo, I have a "vanilla" kernel sitting doing nothing and am scared stiff about trying to compile lm sensors without using apt get even for a foot off the ground (memories of nvidia and alsa haunt me to this day).

And I really still think linux is great and knoppix, to me, has been the most polished distro I have tried. It is the standard I compare all the other distros to that catch my eye. I know it will be a long long time until I can do away with windows. I need the graphics apps that wont work with wine (yes, I have been working on learning gimp and even Karbon14 (which I installed, YAY, me who needs illustrator or photoshop? not me) but there are oodles of others I needin order to keep earning a lousey living. Living with a foot in two worlds. I will be damned if I go doze XP, with the way I swap my salvaged hardware it will never work. With what I went through with customers trying to get anything to work with it that worked under 98, nope, never. But I am a long, long way from knowing what I am doing with linux (I still spend 90% of my free time in it, though . Cracking open another beer and thinking about doing a cold, takeitlikeaman, hard compile install of lm sensors (yeah, I will chicken out and have some chocolate)