Xournal.
If you're wanting a word-processor instead, I'd say abiword over OOo right now; it's lighter, hence faster.

Yeah, you'll have to read some of those threads, at this point. Getting the Debian environment up is kinda easy at this point; no need to read everything there unless you have trouble, but it looks from here like GNOME is a little more trouble right now.

Firstly, it's not a matter of intelligence, it's more education, and we all started there. Linux in a Nutshell's highly recommended, I guess. I learned mainly via Google results, TLDP, man pages, and a miscellaneous pile of Linux books.