Hi, last question for the night...and just in case the other questions don't scream "Absolute Newbie"...
I was trying to install Adobe Acrobat off one of the disks appearing with the Caldera OpenLinux 2.3 for stupidheads kit, and this is what I tried...

[terminal window, from user as su-root, and also from root kde logins]:

<cd/auto/cdrom>

message:no such file or directory

so then:

<mount/mnt/cdrom>
<cd/mnt/cdrom>

the first time I was able to proceed a little further, the second time I got the no such thing message:

<cd Acrobat>
<ls>
<mkdir/tmp/adobe>
<cp linux-ar-40_tar.gz/tmp/adobe>
<cd/tmp/adobe>

at this point, I got a no such directory message [next time I'll write it down...because OpenLinux doesn't recognise my printer either...or my soundcard...or really my video card, but at least I can fake that].

I understand that I have to 'mount' things, rather than just doubleclick an icon and let Windows do the work, but I don't quite follow what the mount process is [found Java NetBeans mystifying for same reason].

yeah, and I see the tar - zip analogy, but don't yet follow that either.
sigh.
Thing is, I was successful in unpacking and running StarOffice on this distro...need another brain to see what I'm overlooking in this case.

When you mount a filesystem for example you are simply trying to incorporate it ( and its contents ) into your current directory tree.

When you "mount" something be it a cd-rom, or a partition
you are mounting the filesystem that is on it..........

Looks to me like you're forgetting to type a space after the command. It's really not that much different than Windows. Drive letters are just pre-defined mount points.

tar is an archive (puts a bunch of files into one file) and gz is compression. So a tar.gz file (or .tgz) is like a zip file (a compressed archive). I've never understood why Unix peeps have always liked using jargon like tarball when the word archive works perfectly well... job security I guess.