I've been using linux for about a week now, and am getting a pretty good handle on what I've encountered thus far; but I see people talking about compiling their kernel and whatnot, and just saying "compile your kernel" gives me a basic understanding of what it is. However- I haven't really learned why I would want to do that. Do I need to? What advantages would I have in doing it, and is it something that I (as a new user) should try. I've got a decent understanding of the console, have done alot of my work and play from it.

Also, approximately how long an operation is it?

Random question: I'm using Mandrake 9.0, dualbooting winxp with lilo, blah. How do I boot to the console instead of into X? Do I need to make a boot disk, or is it one of those vague options in the lilo boot menu? And one more: how do I archive files from the console? Say I want to compress the contents of a directory into a tarball.

Thanks. I've asked alot of questions on this forum the last week, and I greatly appreciate the helpful responses I have had.

Try man tar to read about using that command.

In the Mandrake Control Centre, go to the Boot options, and down the first screen should be an option to automatically start your GUI, you can turn that off, or as root, open /etc/inittab in a text editor and change the default runlevel from 5 to 3

Compiling your kernel may give you speed improvements, but is often done to add or remove support for your hardware or other features you want. MandrakeSoft already tweak the original kernel source code for speed, hence it only runs on i586 machines and above, not i386 like the original code. Therefore you can hold off recompiling it for a while til you need to or are sure of how you'll tweak it, as there probably wont be that much of a performance increase.

Thanks much
As for my mandrake control center, I don't know what happened (probably my futzing with libs to meet dependencies that a wine binary was whining about because i'm.... well I'm a moron ) but it's totally FUBAR'd, doesn't come one, doesn't start, doesn't do a damn thing, so I'll try option number 2. At least it's taking my GUI dependancy down a notch

Hmm, maybe you entered the wrong password when trying to log in to it, and also saved that password for every attempt after that-a bit lame if you can even do that.
Try re-installing it, or get the updated patched version from MandrakeSoft. Or hunt for any logged error messages.

Text-editing the default runlevel isnt hard

You could try finding the individual app that MCC uses. If you get into MCC again you'll see there's a check option in the menu to turn off the default embedded mode, and instead launch each seperate Drak app in it's own window.

Yeah i've pretty much got that part sorted out; I don't care enough about MCC to reinstall the thing. When I try to run MCC it doesn't even ask me for the root password, it just doesn't do anything. C'est la vie. I don't imagine there's anything I can do in MCC that I can't learn to do without it, and that's really what I'm here for. I want to LEARN. I LIKE to learn. At this point my biggest worry is why XMMS keeps shuffling through the same twenty some songs out of a couple thousand on shuffle.

If I bump into something I can't futz with 'manually', I guess I'll have to reinstall it, but really all I wanted it for was to add a user account for my girl, and I already found about 4 other frontends for that one =\