After installation & conf, what should i do firstly?

i think i should explore the system first, but i dont know where to start =-).

Any experts' suggestion?

anyway, i am going to bed now, reading your suggestions tomorrow morning.

Good night.

Of what?

I would say after all your hardware is all setup and you have your gui set up the way you like.
1. Look for a tutorial and learn your way around the command line, ls, ps, grep, tar, how to install things.
2. Learn about file permissions
3. Turn off all services that you dont need
4 Learn a little about iptables and get that set up
5 Compile a kernel (you will get a nice speed increase since the stock kernel isnt optimised for any specific PC, the top post in this forum has all kernel info)
6. Play around with wine(x) and try to get some of the stuff that you are keeping windows for working in linux.

That should keep you busy for a while.

Exactly - of what?

What distro? Are you running command line, console, X? Online or not? (With the Linux box, I mean.) What do you want to do with your new box? Etc.

I mean, if you're running X and hope everything always works and you never want to do anything else, I suppose you pull up some desktop help and find out what icons to click on - or how to make icons so that you can click on them.

If you're running console, or want to, and have mc, fire it up and look over your file system structure to get a lay of the land. Read a bunch of READMEs. Drop to the command line and read a lot of 'man foo' and 'info foo'.

If it's pure command line, do a 'locate profile' and 'locate bash' and then cat the cool stuff - 'cat /etc/profile', 'cat ~/.profile' and what not - and/or just 'set' and if it scrolls off, try 'set | less'. See what your environment is. See what options are in your environment. Probably 'cd /' and a lot of 'ls -l | less' will follow as you explore. But your distro may have given you some aliases so that 'ls' already comes with '-a' and a bunch of pretty colors. So you need to know what's non-standard about what you're going to type.

The main thing is to learn your environment and structure, learn what you've got on the machine, and learn to use those commands. Find out what's in your bins and sbins for commands; what's in /etc and ~ and whatnot for configs; read a lot of man pages. Play around catting a lot of /proc stuff - that's always fun and educational.

In any of this, find a file manager and a text editor (mc is both) and make them your friends. Read their docs and mans and they can save you a lot of time and effort. 'cd' and 'ed' may have their uses but mc saves a lot of trivial gruntwork while still keeping you close to your machine.

Or, like I say - if you've got a cool desktop distro with your modem all set up, click on your browser(s) and surf, I guess.

Oh - and one thing that would help a lot. Find your inittab and see how it connects to your rc.d and see how those files link to the string of files that usually configure bash. Follow them the other way and see how they effect your xdm and xinitrc or whatever files you use there. Learn what happens from booting up to getting your prompt or getting the X login. Then if you want to change what window manager starts up in X or whatnot - a lot of frequently asked questions like that - you'll know how to change them because you'll see what point they're called at and which file governs which element of the process. I'm throwing out file names when those vary from distro to distro, but maybe you see what I mean.

rm -rf... ohh man that is WRONG heheh...talk about god taketh away........... dude you should consider removin dat sweet lil' signature