Hi,
you simply should start with using Linux, probably some kind of SuSE 10.1 OSS....
It's a very good distribution for beginners due to an automatic Installation and configuration (yast2, sax, etc...)
I think you are very interested in it, so you should get yourself worked into filesystems and the bash and things like that....
Later if you are kind of experienced you may want to get an other distribution (a debian based) like gentoo....
all information you really need you'll get in first line of Forums like this one, newsgroups or the all-seeing-eye
www.google.com
have fun by joining the great world of GNU/Linux....
if you have any questions, simply mail me and I'll do my very best to help
email removed
Greets,
Jan