Hi, folks!
I'm a very experienced Windows user with some Linux experience (in RHEL and with a GUI, not so much with command line). I've successfully installed Mandriva 2006 on my second PC (I use a KVM switch), but I'm confused about how to install programs I've downloaded, like urpmi, SSH and a theme for my desktop. I've downloaded the source files to my Desktop folder. After looking at many posts and websites, I've figured out how to extract files from a tar.gz archive, but from there I don't know what to do. In these threads, people seem to skip over the step that tells you how to find the proper directory to install things in, and also how to fix it so that I can type in "urpmi <file from wherever>" and not get an error message saying that urpmi is an unknown command. I know it has to do with setting the path variable, but I'm not quite sure how to do it, even after reading threads on the topic. Would someone be kind enough to baby-step me through this process? I think if I can do it once, I can figure it out for future installs.

Thanks for your patience and help!!

As far as I can say, you can easily install software with your package manager (urpmi) from the internet.

Since, package management is a superuser job, you have to change the user and log in as superuser (even though you are both the superuser and a normal user).

To change the user,
Check out Mandriva's website for instructions on using urpmi. I am sure there must be good documentation on that.

Checkout this site
Tux,

Hi--thanks for the tip! I got urpmi working!