after 24 years with MS, its time to move on?

[audiomick]

im so new to this, that im still unshure if commandline is the same as terminal?
its like driving a car... its easy if you know how, but if you never have seen one before, its hard to know what the shifter, or break pedal is.......even the easiest basics have to be learned....

Yes. It is a good thing to learn how to use the command line to do things in the terminal. You want to get your setup happening, though. If that works quicker for you using a GUI, then do it that way. You will know doubt pick up a grounding in command line stuff as time goes by. I use a mixture of terminal commands and GUI. To each his own.

still- anyone know what the flicker on my tv is?
IS it my tv, graphics card, or sw that makes the picture go black.. its just off for 0,25 secs. every 10 sec. still annoying

Why don't you try running the TV off another computer for an hour or so. That will soon tell you if it is the computer or the TV that is causing trouble.

[DeathByDigital]

my 42" plasma works great on windows...
I did try to install xorg, but either i just get a empty desktop background, with no icons- then i have no flicker...
have to ctr+alt+del to get to logoff screen...and i can rightclick to get into change desktop, and get further to system.. but still no icons on desktop...
I do see the "startbutton" in the logON meny, but logging on, just returns me to the blank desktop. ><

Im downloading the 32bit version to see if that helps...

[DeathByDigital]

still flicker.... GRRR

[Gone fishing]

You can build a server with a GUI for example the first server I built was Opensuse with Gnome GUI and Yast (Opensuse's config tool) was very helpful It was a damn good server lasted some years and was hardly ever rebooted (P4 with 2 Gig RAM). You could build a server based on CentOS for example and install gnome. However, whatever server you are going to use the command-line and edit text files - with a GUI you could use an editor like gedit but nano in the command-line is not to scary.

If you put a GUI on your server you will need more power as some of it your wasting running the GUI - but if this your first go why not. I would suggest Webmin http://www.webmin.com/ a web based graphical config tool for Linux and Unix servers (very good in my opinion). I would also consider RAID 1 where the data is written to 2 drives simultaneously drives are quite cheap and a software raid easy to set-up.