Linux newbie at the command line. Since I don't use Linux that much, in the past I've been GUI-dependent. (Yeah, I'm mainly a Microsoft OS person. We become GUI dependent, don't ya know.) Need to start either KDE or Gnome (I'm comfortable with either) at boot time in an existing CentOS 5.2 installation running in a VMware VM. When trying to run startx I get errors like "failed to load module vmware (module does not exist, 0)" and "No drivers available" and "Fatal I/O error 104 ...."

What do I need to do to:

1. Get a GUI loaded from the command line; and
2. Automatically load a GUI at boot.

Again, I'm ambivalent as to whether to use KDE or Gnome having used both in the past. (Once I get a GUI running, I can pretty much fix the other things I need to do, e.g. start ntpd automatically).

Also, on one system (RHEL 5) I can't load a GUI. (Department policy won't let me.) I need to change the daily cron job that runs mysqldump to run at an earlier time than it currently runs. How do I do that?

Lastly, any suggestions as to where I could find a quick-and-dirty list of major Linux/Unix commands with their options and, perhaps, an example? (I'm going to look into the tutorial on this site!)

Many thanks in advance for your help!