Hi,
I just made the switch to linux a few weeks ago after reaching my journey's end with windows. I installed Linux Mint 17.3 cinnamon on an ASUS N80V laptop and am delighted with it.

The one small problem I have is with the touch pad. It sort of works but has become wonky and the scrolling doesn't exactly work. The pad itself has two buttons and on the right edge of the pad is an area that, if I scroll on it, with the cursor anywhere on the page, the page will go up or down. This no longer works unless I have the cursor on the slider at the edge of the page or if I left click and use the scroller I am able to put the cursor anywhere. I hope that is clear. I'd like to be able to have he edge scroller enabled so I can keep the cursor anywhere.

I've tried changing the settings in system settings > mouse and touchpad to no avail.

I saw there were some other drivers that I could install and try but this is where I am in over my head; I don't fully understand how to use the terminal commands and this relates to my second problem:

I have been trying to import my passwords from chrome into firefox using this tutorial with varying degrees of success.

The preliminary task is to export the passwords from chromium to a csv file. They say to open a terminal and use this command line:
### Chromium
chromium --user-data-dir=/tmp/chrome-tmp --password-store=basic

when I do that I get: command not found.

I seem to get 'command not found' often when I try to use the terminal doing other tasks. Partly the problem is that I am only following other people's commands because I am not fluent in this language at all.

So my immediate problems are de-wonkifying my touchpad (a minor annoyance) and migrating my passwords (something that was simple 5 years ago and now seems impossible. My longer term problem is becoming conversant in writing commands to the terminal. What would a good, really beginner, resource be? And any ideas what's up with the touchpad?

Thanks in advance, I realize this is a long post.

Can't help with thw touchpad, but regarding the fundamentals of program execution, look up beginner guides to the shell, the Linux interactive command interpreter. The bash links in my signature might help, at least their first few steps (the real purpose of those links is learning shell programming, which is a bit more advanced).

EDIT: Intro to Linux may be a possible start for you: http://tldp.org/LDP/intro-linux/html/.

You get "command not found" because the shell doesn't know where the chromium command is. Actually, "chromium" is just a file at a location that is unknown to the shell. If you figure out this location, you can tell the shell where to find it. While there are better ways, you can figure out the location using this brute force command:
which is likely to hurl a lot of messages into your face, among them the location of the command, something like /usr/local/chromium/chromium perhaps. Then run

Thank you!

I will get right on it. Learning the meaning of the terms will help me immeasurably.