I am trying to upgrade to later distros of Linux. First, I'm having trouble copying ISO images to CD, using k3b. I selected the "data" option, but found documentation which says NOT to use that option. However, original documentation said NOT to "burn" images like I would burn regular files, so what should I do? Second, I can't even mount the CD drive. No "mount" point. That doesn't make sense, since I just used k3b to record the .iso images. Third, I was having trouble using the web browsers that came with the original disks. I tried to upgrade to later versions of Firefox, and got messages that Firefox can't launch because of missing libraries. How do I fix this?

The recommended workaround I can think of is to burn isos to usb flash with unetbootin app.

"data" option for iso cd is wrong. You need to burn as virtual disk.

please ask one question at a time.
It seems that firefox can't start because you don't have dependencies. Did you try to upgrade firefox by downloading from web? Correctly would be to upgrade whole system by terminal command or in package manager.

A few years ago I went through a legacy Linux phase, and I had a SUSE 9.0 KDE Live-CD on hand to load in a Virtual Machine and explore k3b.

To burn an ISO image in k3b in SUSE 9.0, click Tools > DVD > Burn Image. From that dialog box you can browse for a file with that image to burn.

As yooy said, you need to upgrade your distro. SUSE 9.0 is too old and doesn't contain the right dependencies for any remotely secure or recent Firefox. I reccomend that when you upgrade you do a Fresh Installation, as upgrading from 9.0 to 13.1/13.2 won't preserve many settings and just create many headaches. I am the type of fool that tried that for entertainment and know that from experience.

Beware that many things have radically changed since 9.0, and if you are using an old computer, you need to download the 32-bit version of openSUSE. If your machine is older than about 6-7 years, KDE may be too resource heavy and you may want to look into MATE if you have perhaps 512 MB of RAM or more, or something lighter like XFCE or LXDE. Increasing your available hard disk space, swap space, and RAM may be advisable.

Also, SUSE 9.0 and any tools that come with it are almost as old as Windows XP and Internet Explorer 6, the standards of insecure '90's antiquity being fresh meat in the modern web. This version is long unsupported and out of date. Don't hop on the web with it.

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data disks ARE NOT!!! bootable IMAGES!!!!!

you HAVE to use "burn as IMAGE"
this is iso burning 101 the VERY first lesson in chapter 1

burn AS image


suse9 is very OLD and VERY DEAD AND UNSUPPORTED
suse 9.0 went END OF LIFE back in 2005
https://en.opensuse.org/Archive:SUSE_Linux_9.0

DO NOT USE SUSE 9 !!!

burn ( as a image) OpenSUSE 13.2
http://software.opensuse.org/132/en

and install OpenSUSE 13.2

or
contact Novell SALES and for i think $399 per YEAR you can buy "SUSE Enterprise Linux Desktop 12 "
https://www.suse.com/products/desktop/
-- release notes
https://www.suse.com/releasenotes/x86_64/SUSE-SLED/12/

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Something worth pointing out that no one already has is that since you don't seem to be a fan of upgrading you may want to use 13.1 as it is an Evergreen release and will remain supported for longer than 13.2.

Thank you all for your responses. I did find a way to get OpenSUSE 13.2 after downloading an abbreviated image file, and I did get Firefox, current version loaded. I do believe I need more memory, as the box is running 166MHz 512MB (1 of 2 slots available). I saw the post and something about LXDE, and frankly don't understand it, and stopped researching it in favor of trying to figure out how to make the current OS version installation to work better (there are system freezes, and I believe it is due to low RAM).

XFCE and LXDE are desktop environments that provide the basic GUI and desktop components (such as task bars, program menus, and often window managers, terminal emulators, text editors and much more). They would use significantly less RAM than especially KDE, which is needs > 1 GB of RAM to run decently. You can install these alongside each other and other desktop environments such as KDE or GNOME by installing their patterns (LXDE Desktop Environment or XFCE Desktop Environment) in YaST's Software Management module to see the performance difference for yourself. You can select the different Desktop Environments at boot time.

For KDE you certainly will need more RAM. You can use GNOME System Monitory or type into a command line to see how much RAM is being used at the moment.

I hope I am not over-explaining - I'm not sure how much you know, but want to try to help you and myself with mastering Linux