I'm sure this has been mentioned before, but I just discovered a great GUI application called Webmin. It's free and will help newbies out who are used to the whole graphical interface. It lets you easily manage and configure your system graphically with easy form fields and checkboxes.
You can manage and configure things like DNS, DHCP, Apache, logs, bootup items, GRUB/LILO, firewalls, proxy servers, vpn, hardware, etc ...
http://www.webmin.com
I plan on slowly migrating my server systems at work to Linux and this will come in handy