A few very noob quick Q's
 

First I must say that this website has been a great help in making me decide wether or not to jump in Linux and I did!

Now most questions I have are pretty basic but I'm just not smart enough to answer them by myself so here they are:

1-I installed suse personal 9.1 and successfully installed a software called houdini through the Konsole and I don't even know how to run it or as a matter of fact what to run(yeah I'm that dumb)

2-I used Yast to install what I think is gnome but I can't seem to find a way to switch to it how to do this

I'm not quite sure this will help but here it goes!
'alt + F2' this should open up a dialog to "run a command" type in houdini, that might help, I'm not positive. Also I'm guessing your refering to this -> http://linuxtoday.com/developer/1999033001115PR. If so check out their web page it might help
http://www.sidefx.com

-Adam

On the K Menu, if you logout, then there should be an option somewhere on the login screen to choose which Wm to use, GNOME should be in there.