I have a few more n00b questions...

Is there any way I can make the tasks in the task bar transparent?

How can I make the icons in the takbar menu smaller?

I can get sound when I play games, but when I play MP3's I don't get any sound.

Can someone supply a link that goes through how to install programs?

your gonna have to give alot more information than that. for the first two, what are you running (wm/desktop environment)

#3: what program are you using trying to play a mp3's?

#4: no idea what distro your running so no

3: I am using xmms

4: I am running suse 9.2


another question...

when I browse files with knoqueror, I have the view set at info tree list and I don't like how they make every other files/folders backgrounds grey and the other ones black. Is there a way I can make it one color?

for 3, check your output plugin ( right click xmmx, go to options->preferences, on the first tab look at the output plugin and see what it is using. also, with some distro's, you have to have a xmms-mp3 plugin to play the mp3 format so check that out too).

for 4, Yast is probably what your looking for. If your referring to compiling programs by source, make sure you have all of the development tools on your system (gcc, g++, automake, autoconf, make, m4, bison, flex, binutils, perl, sed, gawk, etc...) and any <library>-devel package installed for any library you need to link against (Yast uses precompiled ready to run packages so it's by far the easier choice).

you (Xios) forgot to answer that one.. there are differences between them; some can become transparent and some cannot

sorry. I don't know what you mean my "wm" but I am using KDE

wm = window manager

examples would be IceWM, Blackbox, Fluxbox, Openbox, etc

desktop environments are KDE, GNOME, and some others

here is a link to all of the different ones
http://xwinman.org/

wm refers to window manager ( there are many in linux/unix but kde uses it's own called kwin that runs along with the desktop environment).

look in the control center under the appearance section (sorry, I haven't used kde for awhile so I can't be more specific).

i know how to make the taskbar in KDE transparent... if that is what you are asking

1. Right click it, select Configure
2. Click on the tab Appearance
3. In the section Panel Background, select the checkbox Enable Transparency

I have no idea what wm I have. How can I find out? I found and dl this...."xmms-mp3-1.2.7-0.dag.src.rpm" Is this what I need to install the plugin. Like I said I have SUSE using YAST. I right clicked it and selected "install with YAST"

I have another pathetic n00b question. How can I make gaim not connect on startup? I have looked in gaims prefrences but didn't see any option.

in the "tools'" tab on your buddy window, open the accounts window-> uncheck "auto-logon" for each account.

The first question: you have KDE. It has its own window manager, but is so large that it is a complete desktop environment. For the second question.. that looks ok (just that you downloaded the source code. For the third, Lakota said what to do.