I'm determined to get this Linux thing working (!), but I could really use some help with this simple question:
if I download drivers from the 'net to a floppy (using Windoze, as my Redhat 7.0 with Gnome gui is not connected to the Internet) and then insert that disk, how do they get installed? If I open the floppy icon, it just shows the file. Likewise, if I want to install something from a CD, how, exactly do I do it? Should I be in the shell environment? (Specifically, I'm talking about printer, scanner, digital camera drivers and some word processing tools)

Any help is immensely appreciated.

if your using a poncy distro like MD80 then you may well have supermount installed, which should automatically mount removable media, but it's not too relible.

the standard way is to...

mount /mnt/floppy

then cd /mnt/floppy

and then your in the directory. You should be able to mount it in gnome etc by choosing mount from the popup menu.

note: the /mnt/floppy is the DEFAULT location of the disk drive and may actually be somewhere else. LOOK (don't edit yet!) the /etc/fstab file to see where the floppy drive is mounted to.

I know the whole linux tree file system can take a bit of getting used to, but it's much nicer IMHO once you get used to it.