You should stay away from Arch, Gentoo and Slackware as a beginner :)

Now the setup instruktions, when you put in the cd (in RHEL case) or live cd in Ubuntus case is pretty straight forward, just follow the guided install. This will give you a nice Desktop with most of what you need, when you done with the install and you have your new Gnome Desktop in front of you. Then take a look in the upper left corner, there is a button called “applications", press it!

Go to the one called “Internet", there you will find:

“Pidgin": This is your Messenger for yahoo and MSN it can handle several accounts at once, so you can easy have two yahoo accounts logged in at the same time (one for the wife and one for you ;) ).

“Mozilla Firefox": This is Linuxs default browser very stabile and very fast!

If you install it, you will also find skype here. You can download the lastest skype from skypes website: www.skype.com

Now try to go to Applications > office >

Here you will find Openoffice which is a Office look a like, but in many peoples eyes much better then Office provided by Microsoft.

If you go to Applications > sound & video > There you will find your media players and music players for your desktop.

Now try opening a terminal (thats applications>accessories>terminal)

in there you write:

On RHEL:

# man yum

On Ubuntu:

# man apt

This will provide you with the man pages (manual pages), every time you are in doubt just open the terminal and write: man “subject"

This will provide you with a answer most of the time, but if not do a google search or even better post some comments here and i will help you out :)

Apt is your package manager in Ubuntu and it works with synaptic or from the terminal:

#apt-cache search pidgin (this command will find pidgin in your software repository)

#apt-get install pidgin (this will download and install pidgin from the repository)

#apt-get remove pidgin (this will remove it again)

In RHEL yum is your package manager:

#yum search pidgin (this finds pidgin)

#yum install pidgin (install it)

#yum remove pidgin (removes it)

The package managers allows you to acces and download, and install 10,000+ of open source software online, or just update the system in general, just by a simpel click or command, very easy and yet very powerfull app…. :)

NB. On ubuntu you might consider using a script like Automatix2 also, Automatix2 is a free graphical package manager for the installation, uninstallation and configuration of the most commonly requested applications in Debian based Linux operating systems (Ubuntu is Debian based)!