Woops miss fire!! Let me get to answering your questions. 1. simple is not easy? Well this is debatable. Think simple and it mostly easy, think hard and it is always hard! Your first step to easy, is to build a command line vocabulary and familiarize yourself with a command line editor (vi,vim,emacs,etc..) the choice of which is as much philosophical as it is functional. To get you started I would recommend a few books. I love getting documentation on-line but I feel much closer to paper and ink then I do electron guns and liquid crystals, not to mention you will not have Internet access right off the bat. Learning the Unix Operating System, 5th Edition: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/lunix5/chapter/index.html Running Linux, 4th Edition: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/runux4/ vi Editor Pocket Reference: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/vipr/ These all just happen to be O'Reilly books these came right off the top of my head. The Learning the Unix OS book is a great place to start! It has examples and exercises and teaches you all the basic commands you will need to navigate the file system and start editing files. These will be your 1st tools and will also be the basis for learning other commands. Further more you can get started with these books before you get your system. 2. Partitions: The vendor should layout the disk in a reasonable way. If you want to leave some free space for the testing of alternative distributions tell them to leave 10GB free, that should be enough to install a few distros and not leave you strapped for space. As for the physical layout of the data on the disk, you realistically can't control this. The IDE controller will translate the physical layout of the disk into what amounts to one contiguous block. To say that file "foo" is on platter 3 and close the the spindle is almost impossible. Further more the file system will do its best to allocate blocks contiguously and fill in unused space in the most efficient way it knows how. I am not sure how the vendor will ultimately install everything, but the link you sent leads me to a high-end Linux workstation co. they may mirror the two IDE drives leaving you with md0-n and not the traditional hd[a-z][0-n]. File system layout is a big long topic something you will learn after reading the Running Linux book. For now trust the vendor and scorn them later when you are done reading. 3. Internet: You address 2 different points here. I will start with on-line-help. Slackware will come with ton's of documentation. This is often considered on-line even if its not on the Internet. There are docs for most installed applications in /usr/share/docs and there are man pages for just about everything else. You will learn about man in the Learning Unix book. Note that man pages are like legal documents, at first they are difficult to read but once you choke down a few you get the hang of it. Do you have dial up or do you have DSL? The two are a bit different with respect to configuration. I believe there is a section for configuring both in the Running Linux book. 4 Printer: I would recommend using the cups printer daemon. It replaces the old lp/lpd/lpr progs and has a much better configuration. There are scores of drivers, including ones for the latest printers. If it is not installed by default there is a package available. Cups supports almost all HP printers deskJet and laserJet. Wow that was a mouthful, I hope this ans most of your questions. Talk you soon.. Matt