My first Post --welcome to the beginning of the end

Well, I hope at the end of this journey I will be well versed in linux and have a better understanding of networking as a whole. I have finally come to the realization that I am a geek. I have tried to fight it for years now, but there is no denying that growing up on an apple IIc and HP Vectra ES/12 has indelibly scared me.

But I now have a goal, sort of. I am trying to achieve a job in the computer administration field. That isn't saying that I am doing nothing now. I was/am one of the first "gig"ers in the "gig-o-nomics" era. I should say, that actually I have a full right to call my self a gig-er as I am a stage hand and my work was always called a gig. but I digress.....

Here is my starting points. and some early goals...

1. Hard ware
PC 1 - (current specs)
Name - mediabox
O/S - Windows 7 (this probably will not change)
General Purpose:
Games movies and audio
Specs:
Form Factor - miniITX
CPU - Athlon 64 X2 5200+
Memory - 4gb g.skill
HDD - 1tb WD Caviar black SATA
CDR - Blu-ray reader DVD R/RW
PC 2

Name - VPR Matrix
O/S - Windows XP
General Purpose:
Office Applications
Specs:
Form Factor - Full ATX
CPU - P4 2.53 pre HT
Memory - 1 GB oem
HDD - 2x 80GB WD Caviar ide
CDR - HP DVD R/RW
PC3
TBD

I have 3 cases and lots of junk hardware, this will probably be a duron 700 with whatever i can come up with for hardware.

Starting goals:

My media box is getting left alone, Although I may put on some VM and use it for testing in a virtual machine setting.
The VPR matrix is going to be my first full on server. I want to run this as a Samba, Apache, Qmail, etc that also acts as a domain server. Up until now I have only been able to make samba work under root with full privilege (Lame I know)

I have an old D link router I want to flash with ddWRT and get familiar with the interface I would like to make it bridge with my router downstairs and bridge it to a wired connection upstairs in the lab.

Thirdly, at this point, I would like to play with clustering and integrating windows and Linux. Also I would like to test out new OS's as they come along.

So Tonight I started the painful journey into Linux. I have downloaded about a dozen distro's the big dogs are:
Slackware 13.x
Debian
DSL
Puppy
I plan on updating this blog every time I work on any project. I have started a number of blogs in my life, so my hopes that that will happen are kinda mediocre, but can't never did anything