Mike Chirico's Souptonuts project (it's hosted on Sourceforge so that makes it a project, I guess) is full of excellent articles about how to do things with Linux. For example, here's Gmail on Home Linux Box using Postfix and Fetchmail, which is perfect if you use Gmail and want to be able to download and manage your mail on your own PC.
Another example, Create a Custom Live Linux CD - Leveraging BusyBox and OpenSSH, should be useful if you want to build your own customized version of Linux with just the bits you want/need.
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