[midwest]

Steve,

Glad to help.

For the normal computer user who does not do much more than surf and thinks MS lookout express is just fine Linux is over kill and will always be "just a bit beyond" them. But for a web designer who wants to do a bit of scripting the brick wall is breakable, and once broken the rest is like walking up a sand dune. Once you get setup and have a working linux box with php and a server and understand how to use apt-get or similar to install things like php modules its relatively easy to grab examples off the Internet and run them on your box without all the hassle of ftp'ing files up and changing permissions, which linux preserves when unpacking a tarball.

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