This looks like a great guide. One piece of advice I was given early on was to start with a minimal distribution like Gentoo. While not as essential for day-to-day use, knowing about how the various lower-level components interact has gotten me out of a lot of otherwise catastrophic situations across several operating systems - FreeBSD especially and occasionally on OSX. Thanks for writing this guide, it is sure to give a sturdy foundation in *nix usage to the ambitious beginner who follows it.