[falsaberN1]

I quickly learned to symlink certain things (usually the least-updated ones) to folders in $HOME, and put together some bash scripting to copy stuff back and forth. By the time I had a replacement disk I was already somewhat fluent. And yeah, hardly ever had to reboot, only when doing radical changes in setup. I remember I was using windowmaker instead of the default KDE 3 after a while, although I don't quite remember the thought process that led me to it.

[anthk]

Im my case I think it was, at the grub/lilo/syslinux prompt:

          knoppix/linux (or any other kernel image) lang=es desktop=wmaker dma=on 

And a bunch of other options maybe.

[falsaberN1]

Ooh, didn't know it was possible to specify the desktop like that. Maybe I'll try it in a VM someday for fun.