Is it a good distro for someone brand new to Linux?

it is, its meant for newcomers and easy install process
i also beleive its based on debian which is very stable
you could also pop over to distrowatch.com nad look at some of the reviews of xandros

which version were you looking at buying

k, question, and yes I am somewhat of a linux newb....so here goes, does xandros come with iproute? I couldn't fing it and when i tried installing it, still didn't work, think i'll switch to back to red hat, but i really don't feel like it, and seeing as i have xandros already here, would like to get it up, but have never done anything linux with anything beyond red hat 9 a bit ago, so sorta rusty, and xandros is a diff distro........anyways im rambling now, but back to my original question, how do i get iproute working on xandros? i have the newest OCS version, should i upgrade to thier full version(im cheap dun like spending money lol) i have a linspire cd here somewhere, but i hated that distro almost as much as XP lol, any ideas? btw im trying to get shorewall working, got it all good, except the minor detial that it can't find iproute, only the command it needs to function.......lol.

Iproute is available in the Debian repositories. When you check 'unsupported' in the sources list in Xandros Networks you get access to some of these packages. I'm not running Xandros so I can't say for sure but I'd guess that iproute would be in there. If not you could always search the Xandros forums under the keyword 'pinning' for instructions on how to make more of the Debian repositories available.

By the way, shorewall is itself available so the better way is to install that and let iproute be pulled in automatically as a dependency.

If you don't understand any of this, read the Debian Reference (from http://debian.org/doc)

yea, installed shorewall, but for some reason it didn't pull iproute down, perhaps i installed it worng? anyway, thanks for the ideas, i'll try em out, mostly im just jumping back into linux on an entirely new distro lol, so i know the language just not the dialect i guess you could say :-D