Ok, so far so good. I've got my dual boot running, Enlightenment installed with a theme, and I even have that gkrellm program running with the sensors and what not. I've been forcing myself to use terminal now and I'm getting pretty used to it. Even shortcuts like TAB. Anyway, I've looked around and I haven't found a few answers to some questions I have so here goes.

Since I'm using terminal, I'm using it to load programs too. However, the terminal window seems to be taken over by that program. I cannot get a new command prompt and closing the terminal window kills the program. So I end up having 3 windows or so running my stuff. Anyway around that?

Next, the name the terminal uses. It says my hostname is a long string of numbers and dashes but I've checked under the network pref for gnome and it lists me as localhost.localdomain or something close. What gives?

For the first issue you can simply add an & after any command to make it run in the background. For instance, if you want to run kate you would do:

kate&

When you say the name the terminal uses do you mean the title of the terminal or the prompt itself?

I like to use the KDE Konsole. It allows running multiple terminals from the same window. So does the multi-Gnome terminal, but I prefer Konsole.
By using "&" you can background programs (am I using the right term?), you will also need to know how to stop them. Check some docs.
There is also the "screen" program.
Good Luck.

The prompt itself. For instance, it might say...

vipes@e0-20-d2-00-05-42...etc.

On the GUI logon it has welcome to e0-20...as well.

hmmmm...I wonder if that is your MAC address. Not sure but I think that value is your hostname.

Check out the file /etc/hosts . Does it have that string of letters and numbers?

No, it says...

order hosts,bind

Well this is what mine looks like:

# Do not remove the following line, or various programs
# that require network functionality will fail.
127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost

Yours just has:

order hosts,bind

??????????????

Oops, sorry. That was hosts.conf. My actual hosts file reads the same as you.

Well I'm not sure where it is getting those letters and numbers from but you can customize the prompt by changing the value of the PS1 variable. For instance:

Try typing the following:

PS1="What is thy bidding: "

It will change your prompt until you close the terminal. If you want a permanent change then you can add that line to your .bashrc file or if you want it for everybody then you can add that to /etc/bashrc .

PS1 also supports a number of switches as well. You can find a list of them here.

/etc/hosts is typically for looking up the IP address of a system based on hostname (used before DNS and still useful for mnemonic names)
the file containing your host name is typicall /etc/hostname
the hostname command will also report you're hostname

lol....whoops Thats what I meant. Yeah I'm loosing my marbles.

Ahhh that's why I have that long string. There is no hostname file. I'm going to make one. What type of file must it be, conf? And, what has to be placed in it?

An easier way is to run the:

neat

command and configure your host from there.

That command shows localhost blah blah as my hostname. I'm pretty sure it isn't using that because I do not have the hostname file.

Okay then. Try out the:

hostname

command.