I've never been able to get a non-technical person to understand Linux... It seems like it is something that a person has to be introduced to slowly, simply because many of the tools are more powerful and less forgiving than the ones created for Windows.
If you can pull it off, though, more power to you. This world needs more Linux users. Perhaps you can try to develop a set of handy quick reference pages, or FAQ's so that you don't get as many calls in the middle of the night when someone has chmod'd a file and can't use it any more.
