I bought my n810 and a BTKB for school isntead of spending money on a laptop that i have to haul around. Now that i have it - what is the best program to take notes with? Openoffice? Abiword? I would love to isntall gnome on it - but to be honest, my intelligence with Linux is bare minimum.
So -
Question #1 - What is a good office program to use for notes?
Question #2 - Is there a link to install Gnome? ( i read that i have to read two different threads in order to do it?)
Question #3 - If one was to learn more of linux - where should one read?
thanks,
Joe!

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.

You don't need any linux knowledge to do normal stuff on the tablet. It helps to know a few things, but not at all necessary. For a newbie, all the basics Just Work, and you should find good instructions here and on the wiki to install most any program you need.

The Hildon framework used on Maemo is actually a part of GNOME, consisting of some GTK extensions, and IMO much better for a tablet than general purpose environment. You can recompile many GTK apps for the N810 with not a whole lot of effort.

For taking notes, any lightweight text editor will do, like the built in one or leafpad, although you might find the bluetooth delay annoying if you type fast. OO.org and Abiword are overkill, although nice to have for opening MS formatted files.

If you have a desktop, the best way to learn linux would be to install Ubuntu or similar on it and just play with it.

For me, I use the basic notes app in my history/bio/lecture type classes. For my calc, I use Xournal and draw in the numbers/graphs. It really comes in handy to study with on a bus or out in the hall waiting for a class to start.