Well I gave up on Suse 9.1 in the end, if any of you who read this followed my posts. It was pretty, friendly and lacking in a hell of a lot of areas. It wouldn't install anything properly and modules that came pre-installed didn't work. It gave me no end of problems with my optical drive and it generally gave me an impression of "look, but don't touch." RH has so far been a far smoother ride, ironically, given that its far less user-friendly.

Anyways, my questions so far...

1. I installed the KDE desktop from the RH installtion disc and I'm quite happily using it. However, GNOME is the default one. I can choose which one I wish to use from the logon screen and from the switchdesk command, but how do I change my default to KDE?

2. How do I view my NTFS partition. What documentation I've seen so far has mentioned its possible through Samba, but its inevitably followed by an arcane string of commands with little explanation. Could anyone give me a short idiot's guide?

3. Wine. This ties in to viewing my NTFS partition. I'd rather sit down and work out its setup myself, but nearly all the documentation out there that I've turned up on Google immeadiately delves into arcane scripts and commands with little explanation, which is somewhat beyond my ken now. If anyone can point me to Wine for Slow Windows Users, its appreciated.

I can not tell if you are asking about networking or just accessing a NTFS partitiion.
samba is for file and print sharing with a windows network.
If you want to access NTFS partitons on a dual boot PC you will need to install the NTFS modules. BTW this is read only.
http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/

Wine is for running windows applications and not for viewing a NTFS filesystem.

I shoul've been clearer. There's documents on my windows partition that I prefer to work with using linux and burning it all to disc everytime I want to copy them from windows is a pain to say the least.

To get smooth NTFS access, you have to recompile your kernel and add the module. I noticed in the latest core available from RH Networks that they have a much better, supposedly stable read/write support for NTFS. I have no idea why it's not loaded by default. I've heard many people using Fedora complain about that (including myself).

I too am a bigger fan of KDE than GNOME so this is how I switched. First, BACK UP your /etc/sysconfig/desktop file. Next, edit it to look like this:

DESKTOP="KDE"
DISPLAYMANAGER=KDE

Save it and reboot. Now, instead of the GDM login manager, you will be using KDM (the KDE one). It has a bit less eye candy, but it's just as functional. It also means that you will be able to shutdown or reboot from within your KDE session without having to go back to the GDM login screen. You can change some of the options in the Control Center under System Administration --> Login Manager. It also seems to inherit some of root's settings (fonts, color schemes) so you may want to log in as root and customize root's desktop to your liking as well.