check out kde (www.kde.org) and kdevelop. if you are used to a an ide it is pretty neat.
also, for all the good apps check out www.freshmeat.net

www.linuxapps.com also has a lot of good apps. I find it a little bit easier to navigate than fresh meat.

play around with everything you find on your machine that seems interesting. start with "tar xvzpf"''ing something and go from there
try getting used to gcc and ld as well. say to yourself a thousand times that "man is my friend, man will help me" - if not, info will.
autoconf and automake are nice tools, if you have the time.
so is libtool. good to know, if you have the time.

oh and if you havent already, recompile the kernel it''s a good thing to have done cause if find it confusing (its not a big deal since, and less of a pain since xconfig got around) it might just seem somewhat less confusing the second time you do it. and you''ll need to do it.

"This album was written, recorded and edited at Gröndal, Stockholm in the year of 2000. At this point in time money still ruled the world. Capitalistic thoughts were wide spread. From the sky filled with the fumes of a billionarie''s cigar to the deepest abyss drenched in nuclear waste. A rich kid was a happy kid, oh..dirty, filthy times. Let this be a reminder."
- Fireside, taken from back of the Elite album

Try using FOX. Its a platform independent GUI API.
Write Once, Compile Anywhere... and the gui looks like the windows gui... for now. They''re planning on implementing themes.

http://www.cfdrc.com/FOX/fox.html

I''m just speaking of my own experience

The LDP (Linux Doc. Project) HOWTO''s really help too. You probably already have a collection of them installed (they''re in /usr/doc/Linux-HOWTOs on my machine...).
And there are tons of sites with linux articles and tutorials out there, read all you can overcome and have the time to read.

Figuring out how to work vi(m)/emacs/pico/nano/jed/joe/whatever might probably also be a good idea.

"This album was written, recorded and edited at Gröndal, Stockholm in the year of 2000. At this point in time money still ruled the world. Capitalistic thoughts were wide spread. From the sky filled with the fumes of a billionarie''s cigar to the deepest abyss drenched in nuclear waste. A rich kid was a happy kid, oh..dirty, filthy times. Let this be a reminder."
- Fireside, taken from back of the Elite album

Ok, you''ve got vanilla Redhat going. What would i first do? Dig into the GUI. Try a bunch of window managers. FVWM, WindowMaker, Sawfish, Enlightenment, whatever. Try GNOME, KDE, and then try the absense of both (though i suggest keeping both Qt and gtk+ on hand at all times).

Get networking running and then download and install every single library that sounds good and is used in something.

Learn the beauty that is "./configure && make && make install"

Look into the text configuration files for the most used stuff (yes, i''m talking about XF86Config). Just look through files in /etc and poke around, but make backups and make sure you know what you''re poking. Try customizing /etc/motd and /etc/issue.

Learn vim or emacs, at least to the point of usability. Get NEdit for X, and try it out too, but i highly suggest learning vim or emacs, since they (especially vim/vi) are everywhere and available at the console.

Poke around in the files beginning with . in your home directory. Set up your prompt.

Get aquainted with the command line utilities. Especially "file". Find is good too. There are too many to mention, though.

Basically, get comfortable. Make it your home (at least your part time home if you''re dual booting). Have fun with it.

-ben.c

I would suggest editing /etc/inetd.conf, removing everything that you aren''t using (such as ftpd, replace telnetd with sshd and so on...)
Also, edit /etc/rc.conf (or whatever the sysV equalient is) and remove all the crap that you aren''t using.
Doing these two things is a sure way to learn a lot about Linux/UN*X

/Mikael Jacobson