I won't rewrite it, any more that I'd expect or allow anybody else to
rewrite pages on my website. However, as I do expect and act on
criticisms of the speed/formatting/content of my site and I assume
you're the same, here goes. The following applies only to your Linux page:

For some reason the the page loads very slowly under Opera 9.24. Even on
redisplaying the page (clicking the browser's back arrow after following
a link off it) there's a several second delay while the title bar
flashes, switching between its 'current focus' and 'unselected'
appearances, before the page content appears. I haven't yet checked of
Firefox 2.0 also does this.

The Blackdown URL (1st para) gives a 404. Is Blackdown even relevant any
more? I went straight to Sun J2SE (running RedHat Fedora Core 1 at the
time) and now I'm weaving and ducking to avoid gcj, which is a standard
dependency within Fedora Core 7.

The 2nd para should just ignore the earlier RedHat distributions.
Anybody who uses RedHat privately will probably go for Fedora (current
is Fedora Core 8) and commercial users will probably install Red Hat
Enterprise Linux.

Intro 1: Ignore Caldera - its now history. All current distros have
vastly improved installers. My last clean FC7 install took under an hour
 from a single DVD and "just worked". The only reboot was at the end to
start Linux. This left me with a working system connected to the
Internet with a full set of development tools, databases, an office
productivity suite and all the Internet utilities including Apache. The
only external I had to install was Opera, my preferred web browser.

I had downloaded the DVD image (2.8 GB, 90 minutes on broadband) and
burnt the disk myself, but copies are readily available for about GBP
5.00 by mail for those with slower internet connections.

The last time I reinstalled Win95 it took three days and innumerable
reboots by the time I'd reformatted the disk, installed all the drivers
from their separate disks and then loaded all the various packages
needed to make the system usable (MS Office, Opera, Borland C, Java,
Internet utilities, ...).

Equivalents: please remove rsh - nobody uses that these days - it sends
passwords as plain text. ssh does everything at least as well and more
securely. Telnet is used only for debugging and for accessing legacy
applications - plain text passwords again! Add sftp and gftp alongside
ftp - sftp does encrypted transfers and gftp is graphical, very similar
to WS-FTP. As a new entries, add The Gimp as equivalent to Paintshop
Pro, Photoshop, etc. XMMS and Audacious are audio players equivalent to
Winamp.

Installation, Installing hard disk partitions are now obsolete. The
various live CDs (Ubuntu, Knoppix etc) just run when put in the drive
and won't alter your HDD unless you tell them to. Fedora's installer
seamlessly handles everything you mention here. AFAIK the same applies
to other current distros too. My FC7 setup (on a 40 GB disk) uses these
partitions:

Name    Size    %used    Comment
   
/boot    256 MB    9%    contain kernel boot image(s)
/    2 GB    16%    root login, essential programs, temp disk, etc
/var    2 GB    14%    system logs, NNTP files, mailboxes
/usr    15 GB    24%    standard Linux programs
/home    15 GB    44%    all logins and user data.
swap    1 GB    -    excessive (4 x RAM)

and all were defined, created and formatted by the installer. This
system runs SAMBA to fool my remaining Win95 box into thinking that its
a Windows file and print server. If it was dual boot, the Windows
partitions would appear alongside these and I'd be using GRUB, the Linux
boot system, to boot Linux or Windows.

Installing Video: XFree86 is obsolete, replaced by Xorg. Both the Live
CDs and the Fedora installer can configure that without assistance.

Internet installation: The Fedora installer asks for IP, gateway,
hostnames, etc., does the Internet configuration and sets up your
firewall as part of the standard installation.

Additional Hardware: generally speaking, this is plug 'n play: its
detected at boot time and used automatically. USB devices are detected
automatically when plugged in. Memory sticks and disks are auto-mounted
and icons put on your desktop. Ditto CDs and DVDs. Printer configuration
is no harder than for Windows.

Re-installing and clean installing an upgrade: Yes, in general, but
don't keep the whole of /etc because putting the lot back will upset an
upgrade. I just keep the files I've manually changed (hosts, SAMBA and
mail config, etc) and carefully put them back after comparison with the
freshly installed version. Modern installers tend to use just three
partitions (/boot, / and swap) but I think that's not a good approach,
just simple. I use more because:

- /home is separate and contains everything I've added (e.g. Java)
  because this way I can reformat the other partitions, do a clean
  install and not have lost any of my data. There are some post-install
  tweaks needed but they're minor.

- /var is separate so that runaway logging, overflowing mailboxes or
  gigantic print jobs can't fill all the available disk and interfere
  with normal system operation.

- /usr is separate because I thought it seemed a good idea at the time.
  In practise it just wastes space because its read-only data except
  when its being upgraded.

Naming: Its best to always use fully qualified host names, e.g
"host.mydomain.com". If you have your own domain, use it. Otherwise,
make up something and use it within your home network behind your
firewall/router. Don't use unqualified host names, especially on a home
network, because this can confuse the DNS service.

Tips:

I use the bash shell. The following works for it. If you'd like the
current directory to be included in the shell's search path modify PATH
to include the current directory by putting this in .bash_profile:

export PATH=".:$PATH"

If you want to do this for all logins, put it in a small script in
/etc/profile.d - when you login bash runs the /etc/profile script, which
in turn runs all the scripts in /etc/profile.d

Use this mechanism for all your system-wide customizations and keep
copies of them safe so you can drop them back in place after a reinstall.

The control panel user maintenance tool DOES encrypt passwords. You
can't avoid encrypting them.

Add a comment about NEVER using root except for doing system
maintenance. Doing so is asking for trouble. Besides, its not necessary:
there's a useful tool called sudo that can be configured to let
nominated users run specific privileged commands, access protected
files, etc.

Distributions: Replace "Redhat Desktop" with "Redhat Fedora" (FCn, the
free distribution) and "Redhat Enterprise Linux" (RHEL, a paid-for,
supported distribution).

This is getting too long, so I'll stop now. If you want I can go further
into using symlinks and /home to protect locally installed packages,
which would usually be in /usr, from being blitzed by a clean install.
Take this offline if you prefer.