Having problems understanding webs ervers and really need some help
 

Hello I'm new here and really hoping someone can help me. I have been trying now for 3 months to install a web hosting panel on a vps server. I have never worked from the command line before and internet tutorials are very confusing they all assume some prior knowledge. I have tried many different installations, some have worked but were not wht I wanted. The one I really want installed is called xpanel. It has everything I need, but in 3 months I have never had any reply from their web site forums. So i have tried to do this myself.
Now my confusions are as follows: First xpanel requires some packages to be installed first, and I have done that using yum on fedora 10.
When I follow the set up procedure as outlined in the docs, I get to a few places where things go wrong. The biggest issues are firstly with apache. I just cannot understand how apache knows where to read from. I know it has a config file but altering this has never produced any change. When apache installs var/www or var/httpd has my index page etc.
But when xpanel installs, it installs to home/temp/. I just don't get it.
On cpanel for example web pages follow a logical path, but on vps home or root etc are not in that path. So first I need to know after installing apache what am i supposed to do to configure it?
The next problem is that when I try installing xpanel (using putty) it abrubtly stops installing and i get a message saying i need to configure 2 ip addresses in eth0 and eth0.0 but how on earth do i do this, i can't even find eth0 and eth0.0.
I am up nearly all day and night just trying to figure this all out and I've wasted 3 months rent on a vps for something i thought i would have up and running in a couple of days, and I am so tired.
Please make your answers simple enough for a beginner to understand.
Your help is very much appreciated.

This is hard to answer because there are some pieces missing.

Is this your server or is it space on a hosting service somewhere?

Do you have physical access to the box?

I'm not familiar enough with Fedora to know where in /etc to find the relevant configuration files for the ethernet connections.

Based on nothing, I'm going to hazard a guess: It sounds as if xpanel wants root access.

Do you have root access to the machine or is it at a hosting service somewhere out there? If it's on a hosting service, it would probably be best to direct this question to them.

I've never worked with xpanel, but I have used Apache and the Xampp stack on my own server and never run into anything like this, but, because it was my box, I did the configuration as root.

hello Frankbell and thanks for your answer. This is a slice of a vps from slicehost, so no i don't have access to the physical box.
I have total access to the slice it comes with just an operating system and there are several to choose from including ubuntu, fedora, etc.
So basically it means configuring everything from scratch, not so easy for a beginner...it's a far cry from cpanel! Still i've learned a lot.
(it's easy to delete a slice and re-start if i mess up so it's an ideal training ground) But the thing is for example if i was on cpanel and say i uploaded several files aaa, bbb, ccc. I could access them on the web by www.mysite.com/aaa or www.mysite.com/bbb etc. Now i cannot understand on this level of hosting how files are lets say stored on the slice. Take apache for instance, my sites are currently located as
var/www/vhosts/mysite but if i wanted them as home/mysite how do i do this? It says to use apaches config file, but it makes no difference what i write in the config. Also, if i look in the etc folder, there is apache, if i look in the bin folder, there is apache, in fact it's everywhere. So i'm puzzled as to what exactly happens at root level when a site is installed? Now xpanel is a free hosting set up which allows users to use their own domain and name servers. So it requires two ip addresses. It say's i must have two ip's configured in eth0 and eth0.0. There's a lot of folders and sub folders at root level to search through to find eth0 and eth0.0 and believe me i've searched, they don't seem to be there.
I was hoping someone might be able to say something like 'look, the etc folder is for this, the bin for that and so on' just so i could get an understanding. Take another example. zpanel installs in var/www/
the mysql server and mail servers install below that so how do you instruct a web page to read these other folders? I could read anything in my browser by going to www.mysite.com/blah but how do you read something below www? So apart from not knowing where to find this eth0 etc, I just don't understand how a server is instructed or 'knows' where to read from?