Hey, I juat want a basic linux without the X window system, Gnome, or KDE. I just want a version That I can learn regular Linux. Does anybody have any suggestions?

slackware

Although I LOVE slackware, it is a little different to most other distros like redhat, suse or mandiva. It is actually more unix-like than the others. If you want to learn linux so that you can configure most distros, perhaps one of the main ones would be better. You can generally select whether to install X or not during setup. If it is going on old hardware, slackware, debian, gentoo, mepis, DSL or even a BSD flavour would be good. All that being said....GET SLACKWARE! It is pretty much the fastest and one of the most stable distros I have used and I have it now installed on my servers at work, my desktop at work as well as on my computers at home. Saying that, I am currently looking into ubuntu (and kubuntu) for a substitute to windoze for my users at work....not sure how well it will run on older hardware, shouldn't be too bad without X. It is based on Debian and everything just seems to work. Hell, I even plugged four Xbox controllers into my laptop with ubuntu on the other night and it worked with xmame straight away....I'd like to see windoze do that!

I started with RedHat (now Fedora) and Mandrake (now Mandriva), but I didn't actually learn much until I switched to Slackware. I run Gentoo now, but it's a chore to install, even for an experienced user with a fast machine. The only thing weird about Slackware is the BSD init system, otherwise it's about as standard as a Linux distro could be.