Hey, I am having a hard time with linux because most install readme files don't give a detailed explanation and I always get errors when installing because I don't know the magic keys to type to make anything work. So far I have redhat 9.0 set up and thats as far as I have gotten (after many reinstalls and discovering the usefullness of the user accounts).

Anyway, I would like to know if there were any good websites that provides good information on how to install programs in linux, and a few key commands that everybody should know.

If anybody reading this knows any commands that are frequently used to install rpms tgz and any other file please tell me.

I am trying to install checkinstall now so that I can uninstall programs I dont need, but I can't install anything.

So that this post is for a broader base than only checkinstall if anybody knows how to install things in linux, please say things like tar -zxvf program.rpm (so people can figure out it works for other things than checkinstall.

What I am looking for is any keys that I can use to install programs, and any keys that would be useful to know for future refrences as well.

Well since you are using RH 9.0 you can use RPM to install. The commands you should probably get to know for rpm are,
rpm -Uhv (updates/installs and shows verbose information. This is good to watch so that you know how the install is going).
rpm -e (this erases the software that you want to install)
rpm -qa (query all, this is really nice to pipe with grep)
example: rpm -qa | grep "file_name" will display whether the file is installed or not

for installing tgz/tar.gz you'll need to do a chain of commands.
First you'll want to unpackage the files (tar -zxf <filename>) and then you'll want to CD into the directory that is made. From there you'll want to view the INSTALL file to be sure of what you need to do and follow it's instrutions. Most software can be installed easily with a "./configure" script and you can pass the "--prefix=<directory_to_install_to>" option if desired. Configure has many optoins -- you'll use more depending on the software you want to instlal. After that is done a simple "make" and then "make install" (as root) should install the software for you. If you get errors it's most likely due to deps. You'll want to install the packages it asks for.

Check out this link !
YoLinux Tutorial: Linux System Administration