I am FED UP with windows, it’s unreliable buggy counterintuitive and its proprietor is fundamentally corrupt and EVIL with a really big E… so I want to learn and convert to Linux but I don’t know where to start. I am a passionate and avid learner but am relatively poor (I almost went bankrupt creating my system) and all the books out there are like $40+ even used but all the sites I’ve been able to find (I’ve never been particularly apt with the interweb[sic]) have been forums or written by programmers for programmers of which I am certainly not. I need a solid tutorial or thorough explanation of the VERY basics of Linux that comprehensibly works its way up. Just from suggestions from some of my friends I’m probably going to use Gentoo, if that maters? What is out there, what are my possibilities, am I going to have to spend money to learn how to use a philosophically free and open product?

Well, maybe you should check out http://www.distrowatch.com to learn more about each Linux distro and perhaps do a comparision in the process. And if you are thinking about reading up, http://www.tldp.org is a real nice place to visit since it has HOWTOs for almost everything that is related to Linux. Of course, Google is not a bad place to use every now and then! taurus

You could decide to spend the $40 on a boxed version of a distro which often come with good manuals and documentation to get you started. Eg the last version of SuSE I saw came with an installation guide, a separate manual about 7 CDs and a DVD, some badges and stickers etc....all for about $30. SuSE is up to version 9.1 now yet I still sometimes refer back to the manual I bought with v6.0, even though I don't even run SuSE any more! www.tldp.org is great and you can often find many of the HOWTOs and other documentation locally installed in /usr/share/doc/.

Hi there. you need no money to learn linux. You need no expensive PCs (a 286 will do). You could try FreeBSD. They got the best documentation around. Check out their site (www.freebsd.org). Though it 's a little tricky to install, their online manual is simply huge, and downloadable! Better than books. RedHat got great manuals too. One of the easiest to install is Mandrake. Conectiva (that now is United Linux) is very good too, it got a graphic installation, with partitioning tools, etc... it's really good (and I haven't installed the latest version). Search the internet. You'll many sites and forums. And Linux itself got the man pages, where you can learn almost everything. Check out these sites: LinuxIso.org (download linux images), linuxquestions.org, redhat.com, conectiva.com.br, linux.org, etc... Linux rules! 2200+ XP 256 DDR... huh ... who cares?

Download a bootable CD distro like knoppix, slax, DSL or any of the others and have a bit play with it to learn your way around and just read up on things as you find you need to. Once your comfortable with it then try an install, apparently Mandrake is the easyest to install (its the only one I've tried and I found it as easy as w2k or xp and with better hardware recognition)

this is a good place to buy books www.alibris.com

You can always find extremely cheap distros on ebay. Many sellers there download distros using high-speed internet ceonnections, burn them onto CD and auction them off. The downside is that you just get the CDs and no documentation. You could probably work through that using the aforementioned sites. Even now I see some distros starting at $2. Definitely do some homework before you invest. Trying a distro that runs off CD is an excellent suggestion. Good luck.