Okay, I'm sure I'll miss some things so please feel free to ask but here's where I'm at. I make my living from home on my computer and NEED something that works for more then a month at a time. I went to W2K about 2 years ago and was able to enjoy up to three months at a time without something crashing my system. But with 3 years of having 3 computers, 57 blue screens and 30 reformats I'M DONE!!! I figure if it takes me 3 months to get the hang of Linux I'll be ahead when I account for time and money lost from system crashes, not to mentioned money saved on OSs.

Here's what I've gotten done, I've spent the past week looking into, reading up on and playing with Linux. My first thing was to find the distro I wanted (after finding out there were so many), I decided I would use Mandrake and try Knoppix and I had two crashed computers to get info off still.

I've only been able to run Knoppix off the CD, Suse won't work on the live CD on either computer and Mandrake won't install on either. For that matter I can't get Knoppix to install to HD either.

With Mandrake I have 10.1 and when I try to install on a AMD 1700 with an ESC mainboard it says there's a RPM RAM? Issue? I get the same thing on my main computer with an AMD 2800, MSI KT4 Ultra mb and radeon video card. Both had HDs whiped with killdisk and no partitions. It's my understanding this may be an issue with the size of the first disk?

Suse live didn't start on either, it just got stuck on something and wouldn't start up on either system.

With Knoppix, works great on both systems but if I click on terminal program and type in "knx2hd" it ends up getting stuck on some partition issue with both.

So, my first choice is to run Mandrake followed by Knoppix on my HD so any help would be GREAT but here are my noob questions.

1) What do I type from the DOS looking boot command to get back to Knoppix or "home" on whatever distro I'm using.

2) How do you install programs on Linux? Say I download Firefox, then what?

3) I don't even know enough to know anything else to ask so pretned you were stuck in MS hell for the last 8 years and so badly want to be free of their BS, what do I need to know? Simple things like basic commands and how to's would help A LOT!

Thank you SO MUCH in advance. I've looked for my questions A LOT but really could just use some help now as I can't find anything but tiny pieces of what I need in each place!

Adam

Some links:
www.distrowatch.com
http://rute.2038bug.com/index.html.gz (Great Tutorial)
http://cbbrowne.com/info/unixshells.html
http://www.linuxselfhelp.com/
http://www.linuxheadquarters.com/index.shtml
http://www.linux.org/
http://tldp.org/

You might check out Morphix http://www.morphix.org/ and Ubuntu http://www.ubuntulinux.org/

Morphix is a live-cd that is made to install to the hard drive if you want. Both are based on Debian as is Knoppix.

Knoppix is designed to be booted from a CD. I use Fedora Core (http://fedora.redhat.com). It is very friendly and most things work by default.

Red Hat/Fedora is all about the newbies.

Ok about the installation process.....you've asked the question and the answer could probably be written as a book but here are two ways to install things.

RPM Package: If you download a file that ends in .rpm, you can install it using the following command "rpm -i whatever.rpm" from the directory that the file exists in.

From Source: If you download the source code to a program (it is an archive, usually ending in .tar.gz or .tar.bz2) then you must compile the program in order for it to run. Unzip and untar the archive (if you are unsure how then use google). Then you must compile, this is a process that varies greatly but usually it is done like this.

./configure
make
make install

Run these three commands from inside the first folder you got when you untarred the file. If this fails, see the README file from the folder.

The program you mentioned (firefox) does not install either way. It is a script, which means it does not need to be compiled. Simply download it (download the archive that DOES NOT have "installer" in the filename because that one is querky). Simply unzip and untar it into a folder and run "firefox.sh" and firefox will run.

Hope this helps

have to agree with borrrden, pretty much a linux noobie myself and fedora core 2 is easy to install, configure and use.