Can any of you Linux literate people advise me where to locate sufficient information to down load and install an application such as Thunderbird
in Linux.I have installed SUSE 10.2 successfully but get download as far as archive then I'm Stuck.
Your assistance will be appreciated.
Thanks
David Ross

Always start with the package manager--all the common applications will be accessible there and the process is automatic and painless. You'll find the package manager in your menus somewhere--the title will be something like "install software" or install applications".

yast is right under System; select software management and start a search for whatever you need. You may also want to google for openSuse repositories to gain access to even more packages.

In addition to the other posters I would strongly advise anyone to stay with the software packages that are in the repository for your distribution. The people who maintain the distributions do a lot of work to ensure that a new version of each application will work with their version of Linux before they put that package into their software repository. Sometimes they change where the files will be installed. Sometimes they check for specific versions of software that the new package depends on in order to work properly.

What I'm saying is DO NOT download a new version of Thunderbird from the Mozilla web site and try to install it. Wait until your distribution maintainers include that new version in their software repositories.