my advice goes against the typical norm but i say download something that installs easy like red hat, piddle around with it a couple of weeks just to get a feel and then go to linuxfromscratch.org...

i also have been troubled by red hat 8.0 i would go back to 7.3, but i never really liked it either. i wish corel had never quit, they had such a nice system out of the box everything was configured...