[Chrysm]

Jump right in with gentoo. They give you the install guide and in it they explain some basic linux stuff. Also, your best way to learn is to stay away from windowmanagers for a while and stick with the console. No matter how bad you want to use Mozilla-Firebird, DON'T!!

This will force you to find the answers yourself and help you to figure out troubleshotting processes.

For example... you don't know what program blah does and when you run it you don't get any output, it just exits... what do you do.

Firstly, try blah --help or blah -h to see if it gives you a list of commands on how to run it and it may also tell you what the program does.

Secondly, you gan do man blah to see if it has a manual.

Thirdly, you can head on over to the ever faithful /usr/doc or /usr/share/doc where every program installed has documentation and start reading.

NOTE: I have noticed in gentoo that some of the docs are .gz'd (gzipped). To view these type man /usr/share/doc/blah-x.x/README.gz

Another helper that everyone new to linux should know is the locate command. You use it by locate blah and it spits out a list of files and directories that have blah in thier names.

A REALLY IMPORTANT one is the less command. When you try to locate something, it will scroll by really fast. You can pause it by piping it to less like so... locate blah | less
You can scroll up and down and when you're done hit q for quit. same thing with man. Scroll up and down and hit q when you're done.

You can even send the output to a file like this locate blah > nameoffile

All executables should be placed in a folder with bin in it's name example /bin /usr/bin These are folders for binARY EXECUTABLES.
You also have sbin which is the folder for commands to be used by administrators which are more powerful for the average user to use at first.

To display the contents of the currend directory you type ls for list
'ls -l' long list 'ls -a' list all or use them together 'ls -al'

Your current working directory should be on the prompt somewhere liek [root @ host root] # nameofuser @ hostname directory #

Well I think I have rambled on enough but, I think everyone who wants to try linux should know those commands. And if you don't know what to do, you can always find it in some sort of dobumentation because, you're not the first one to ride that rodeo ;P