Many of the things you ask about have been discussed in this mailing list. You can download the whole list archive with

wget http://lists.mur.at/pipermail/grml.mbox/grml.mbox

Thunderbird or Seamonkey on Windows should be able to import or open this so that you can search it.

Good Luck! Moss

Thanks, I'll check all those things out. At the moment it is even more confusing, as I'm a blind user and I have to learn, not only linux, but also how to work with speech in linux. At the moment I haven't goten gnome to run even; the startx command does nothing, but I guess that is another topic...