>> I'm the only person using my laptop, so shouldn't I be logged in as
>> root?
> No -- why should you be?  If nothing else, it's easy to cause damage
> accidentally that way.  (I log in as 'smb' on my laptop, and I have
> >25 years of experience with Unix...  I do keep a root window
> available but iconized, but I only do root things in it.)

I too have long experience with Unix, perhaps not _quite_ as long as
smb's (I first started using it in the mid-'80s), and I too don't
normally run as root.  I used to - for much of my career the mouse
login was uid 0 on my machines - but I've found that the risks of being
able to wipe out anything with a mistake outweigh the advantages
(largely convenience).

There is a nontrivial amount of software out there that does not
correctly distinguish between multiple users with the same UID.  (For
me, this would normally be a reason to run this way, as I usually
prefer to render broken software _obviously_ broken; I mention it for
what it's worth, and you can count it as an advantage or a disadvantage
according to your own point of view.)

>> When I am editing a text file, and I go past the last line, the beep
>> comes up to tell me that I am at the last line.  The beep is scary
>> and annoying.  How do I get rid of it?
> I assume you're using 'vi'.  The beep is vi's main error message; I
> don't know any way to disable it.

You could of course switch editors, or if you have to, hack on vi to
remove the code for producing the beeps.

> Once you get into X -- and that's what you'll have to do for windows,
> and I fear it's complex -- you can select xterm's 'visual bell'
> option.

If you're using xterm, of course; there are plenty of other terminal
emulators for X out there.  (Including mine, which I don't recommend in
this connection because it has no way to disable beeps.)

But X isn't all that complex.  The worst part is that you're on i386
and hence will have to deal with all the x86 config-file foo, but once
you're past that, it's not bad unless you want to write code for it,
and mostly not even then.  (I disagree with Henry Spencer on this
point, yes, I know.)

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