LinuxQuestions.org - New to site, and new to SuSE 10

Hi,
First post here, I have been trying to mess with Linux for years (I think I have an old distro of RedHat 4 or something from years ago) but always found it too hard. One day in the store I felt brave again, and went looking for Linux in Best Buy, all they had was this SuSE, one I had never heard of before. I also bought Partition magic as I anticipated needing to split my Windows partition and thought it would be a battle. To my surprise SuSE made my partitions and installed just fine, it autodetected most everything, and my internet even worked on my first boot. I had never gotten this far before. I began to look for graphics drivers to see what games I could run. I have an ATI Radeon 9800, so I went over to ATI's site and found an installer program... Nice and easy, I like that. It took me a while to figure out what to do, but I went into the Super User terminal. I found myself in a different directory (root?) and could see no way to find my main user's home directory (Narev). I used my newly learned wget command and downloaded another copy of the installer to where I was. Following the instructions on the ATI site, I entered "sh ati-drivers-installer-8.24.8-x86.run" and up came a pretty GUI. I selected "automatic install" and a bunch of stuff happened. Then it said I needed to run "aticonfig" which I did. It also said something about being sure to save my XWindows config file? So I ran "aticonfig --basic" or something like that, there were a ton of commands I didn't want to mess with just yet. I couldn't find how to save that file, but there was a "Save Settings" option for when I restarted the comp, perhaps that was it? I clicked that and restarted. Now, I had found a program called Cedega which claims to be a shell that would allow me to run windows games (It has a subscription fee , I may be getting ripped off). Cedega has a thing to test my 3D graphics capability, but it failed just like the other times. I then tried to install BitchX following the instructions on their site which were as follows:
$ wget www(dot)bitchx(dot)com/ircii-pana-1.1-final.tar.gz
$ tar xvfz ircii-pana-1.1-final.tar.gz
$ cd BitchX
$ ./configure
$ gmake
$ gmake install_local
Turned out I didn't have gcc, so I whipped out my SuSE DVD and installed att the gcc related stuff. I got farther with ./configure the second time, but it said some things were missing and I ultimately couldn't do gmake. I want to understand what I am doing when I type those things (I know I am compiling the program, but what are the things it needs and why?) I thought about using an RPM, but now I understand an RPM not specifically for my SuSE might not work? Also on my wish list is a driver to let me use the back and forward buttons on my mouse within Firefox, but I could live without that. If you can reccomend any books that would be a help, I'd like that. I have SUSE 10 for Dummies, but it's not quite technical enough for my tastes (They spend time explaining what e-mail is for god's sake) and an older book called "Linux in a nutshell" that I haven't spent much time with. Then there's the SuSE manual. I would very much like to make friends in the Linux community that I can learn from. I long for the day (if it ever comes) when I can discard Windows for good and still play my favorite games!

-Narev
:newbie: