OK, I officially have a new favourite Linux for newbies. My advice to all newbies from now on would be to get Knoppix Live, burn it to a CD and use it from there. It's one of the most impressive distros I've seen in a long time. It's fast (it boots faster from cd than a default install of slackware does from my hard disk), full featured and has excellent plug and play support. It even got my internet connection going without any setup at all. Surprisingly, I didn't even have to enter my (static) IP address or gateway. Just click on Konqueror and bam! I'm browsing. Even Windows XP couldn't do that! My only gripe with this is that it requires a few kernel parameters to set up properly. The default keyboard layout is german and it chokes if you don't have any scsi devices unless you explicitly specify that you have none. Here's the boot line that I use, it should be ok for most people (type this at the boot prompt):
knoppix lang=us noscsi screen=800x600
Cheers,
cgkanchi

Edit: Oops, I forgot to post the link!
ftp://uiarchive.uiuc.edu/mirrors/ftp...3-01-20-EN.iso