My little introduction

Installing Linux.

Networking your box.

Locking your box down.

Configuration tweaks.

A few invaluable utilities.

My pickings of the available software.

Linux links, bookmark them now.

People new to linux often ask me to recommend a Linux equivelant of the tools they are used to using under windows, here are my personal recomendations.

System Monitoring

If you have more than one machine then some form of remote systems monitoring software will become invaluable, BigSister is such a tool.

For more information on configuring BigSister, check out my BigSister configuration section.

Audio/Video Player

XMMS the X Multi-Media System, it has skins, can play cd's, audio files and videos.

Web browsing and E-mail

I use Mozilla mail for my e-mail needs

IRC

BitchX or gtkBitchX if you want a gui front end to it

Usenet

Forte Agent. A bit of a contraversial choice here, my favourite usenet client happens to be a windows application, luckily it actually runs better under WINE than it does under Windows!

For those of you who don't want this sort of "cop out" solution, may I recommend Pan.

Downloading

There was one application I missed under linux until recently and that was an integrated download manager and ftp search tool that would find the closest mirror of the file you selected.

The windows tool I used for this was an old version of Gozilla (new versions of it suck). But now there is an even better tool