"My hardware is older than yours.  Nyah, nyah!! And it runs Linux.  See 
you at the meetings or on IRC."

Yes, I have heard that there are those who pride themselves on running 
Slackware on a 486. Actually, the way this all started for me was when 
my K6-2/300 unit, running Win 98 the 2nd, started to act as if it were 
being consumed by something nasty, perhaps viral in nature. My brother, 
the family Windows guru, thought he would fix everything by installing 
Win ME. Turned my diseased system into a total bust.

Needless to say, I was delighted to see a quick destructive install of 
SuSE on the "old" box. Instantly more fun, to say the least. Now that I 
have a "modern" hardware system, I wonder if I should have just kept 
using the old box, and bought something to hook up to the tele for 
games. Then again, I wouldn't have had the pleasure of moving my NTFS 
garbage over to a partition one third of it's original size, to make 
room for Linux. Something about that actually made me laugh.

THANKS TO ALL FOR THE TIPS! And for helping me feel less intimidated in 
a world of unfamiliar things.

I shall proceed to MicroCenter cheap book section, find Arson, torture 
myself with the Rute Users Tutorial (actually, that does look like a 
decent challenge), look at the KDE program for rpm's and go to the next 
meeting.

Rick