If those who post here are newbies, than what am I? Eternal moron or what?
Ha! I've been running Red Hat and various other "flavors" of Linux for the past...well, the first version of Red Hat I bought (!) was v5.2, however long ago that was...and I still consider myself a newbie.

I'd probably be further along if I dumped Windows altogether, but I'm not really an OS "fundamentalist."

One problem with starting out with Debian (upon which Knoppix is based) is that there's not a whole lot of books out there about it. If you'd like to learn how to use Linux more painlessly, you might start out by buying a book like Sams' Teach Yourself Red Hat Linux Fedora in 24 Hours or O'Reilly's Learning Red Hat Enterprise Linux & Fedora, 4th Ed., both of which come with Red Hat Fedora on CD's.

Then come back to Knoppix and Debian, because its package management system is superior to Red Hat's.

That's my 2 cents!