Always good to see a fellow Slacker
Here's a quick overview of a typical file system:
/bin - Essential user programs. This includes stuff such as filesystem commands (ls, mv, cp, etc.)
/boot - Files which are used by LILO
/dev - devices
/etc - holds system configuration files, such as X config, startup scripts, user database
/home - home is your user directory for your personal files. e.g mine is /home/adam. Every user will have their own and can specificy which Windows Mangener to initialize, etc.
/lib - This contains system libraries, such as the C library and ncurses, etc.
/lost+found - Every time the system boots, it checks the filesystems for errors. Errors corrected by the fsck program are written here.
/mnt - a directory which is used for a temporary mount point.
/opt - directory for optional software packages
/proc - Virtual system that provides access to the kernel information
/root - the admins directory.
/sbin - programs run by root and boot-up process.
/tmp - a temporary storage location
/usr - Probably the biggest directory. Holds programs, docs, X windows, kernel source, etc.
/var - holds log files, cache, etc.
Most tasks don't require that you need to be in any specific directory. Have a good read of your manual and you will find more about commands. As for things such as CPU usage and so on, here's a few commands you might be interested in:
ps -aux (gives info about processes, CPU & memory usage, etc)
top (lists the resources in order from highest to lowest about load average, number of processes, CPU status, free memory, etc)
du (shows disk usage)
Another applet I use is called
gkrellm, which is a little tool that sits on your desktop that monitors your swap file, CPU usage, free memory and processes as well as network activity. It is well worth downloading.
