over the past couple of months i have heard many things about linux. My problem is i don't know the first thing about it. I am looking for a free linux that has very good network securty features. Also one that u can get a half descent office suit (eg. Word, Excel, ect) for. If you have any sugestions about what i should do and where to do it please help. all input welcome.

Check out Mandrake (www.mandrake.com). It comes with Star Office (which will read Word and Excel files) and lots of other neat stuff. It is free for the download if you have a fast connection/burner or you can pick up copies in the real world if you don't (if there's nothing close to you, or you don't mind the wait of shipping, check out www.cheapbytes.com). My wife ( has regularly used Win95/98/NT4 and Office at work for the last 4 years) had absolutely no trouble switching to Mandrake/Star Office on her computer at home. If you want to learn the console, be prepared to set aside a bit of time for some reading. Being a Red-Hat guy myself, I'm not sure about any good books for Mandrake (any Mandrake users care to recommend any?), but I'm sure they're out there. There's also lots of info online to be had (check out www.linuxdoc.org). When I started, I set aside two weeks (on holidays at the time) to get it up and running. It took much less - I had a secure happily running system in four days, and had a webserver and FTP set up securely within another two. Do lots of reading, check out newsgroups and discussion groups like this, and search the archived questions. Odds are very good you're not the first person to have certain problems, and the answers might already be there. I think it's well worth the little bit of extra effort required in the beginning. Of course, you may never need to use the console (my wife doesn't) in which case it's even easier to learn.

Assuming you have enough disk space, and already run Windows, when installing linux configure it so you can dual-boot, and choose between your Win and Lin OS's at boot time. Then you can play with the Lin when you want and still retain your old setup. All distros have some online documentation, but I was very happy to have my big RedHat book right in front of me when I got started and I still refer to it frequently.