Total newb here, I have about 7 hours of Mandrake under my belt but ran into a snag. I tried to install some Nvidia drivers and the install program says I have to install binutils and make sure ld is in my path. I went and found binutils and installed per their instructions and the Nvidia proggy still says it can't run without ld in my path. I added the binutils/ld dir to the path by editing the bash_profile but when I type $PATH, it seems to indicate that it cant find the binutils/ld directory. I know it's gonna be something easy but I can't quite seem to be able to figure this one out.

binutils will be installed by default.
if so the usual path for ld is /usr/bin/ld
you just need to make sure that /usr/bin is in your path.
to do so just do a export PATH=$PATH:/usr/bin or wherever you think the binaries are.
and then do the install stuff.
when you edit .bash_profile the changes will apply only when it is run ie when you login
or you need to run it explicitly by source .bash_profile