I have installed the first CD iso of Debian woody and installed Gnome at the moment, I need to open a web browser to do something, but i don't know how.

I am really new to linux.

thanks.

open up a terminal and type mozilla there.
or press ALT + F2 and type mozilla in the run command box that you get.

Also in the Gnome menu go to the internet section and see if you have any web browsers listed. If yes, click on any of them.

I typed mozilla but there is an error message

"- bash command not found"

this means that you do not have mozilla installed.

try firefox, netscape, epiphany, konqueror, or galeon

if none of these works then you do not have any web browser installed and you will have to download and install them.

do you think i have already installed Gnome or not? I just installed the first CD image of debian woody.

I guess u said you had installed Gnome ???

What do you get when you boot your computer?. Do ya login into text or graphical mode?. If you login into text mode type startx and see what happens.

sorry I thougt i installed gnome but it seems I was wrong.

I logged to a command line mode and typed startx but command not found.

This means that you have not installed the X window system i.e. the graphical user interface.
So you will have to work in the text mode itself. There are a few text based browsers also like lynx etc.
Never used them though.

I'll suggest you do a full install or at least one with the X server and some desktop environment (kde or Gnome).

Hope that helps.

I don't know if this will help you much but Debian is not a newbie friendly distro! It's actually one of the roughest (from my experience). If I were you I'd try something like Mandrake (use to be very "user friendly", don't know now) or Ubuntu. They'll do alot of stuff for you. One of them is setting up a useable desktop environment.

Since you have not installed your X, you could use text browser's. Try using elinks, links, lynx. Type any of them in your command prompt and you get the text browser. But before that configure your network.

-Prasanta

Haiyadragon

thank you for your advice.

prasanta:
I have typed all of the text browsers you gave me but no one works.

the aim of opening the web browser is to configure my network. because I am in my university's LAN to connect to internet. I have to set up my IP address, subnetmask, DNS server, default gate. I have posted a thread in the networks section and someone told me I must open a web browser to do these things.

thank you.

No, not at all. You do not need a web browser to configure your network. These are your system settings. I have not used Debian so I cannot tell you how to configure your network in it. There must be a tool somewhere to do this.

You only need a web browser for accessing the internet and in that you have to specify the I.P. address / port no. of your proxy server (if you are connected to one).

Try Googling "Configuring the network in Debian Woody" and see what you get.
Also there is a Debian forum on this site. Browse that forum and see if ya find anything.

no, I am not configuring the network in the browser.

the guy told me to configre the network in Webmin but to open webmin I need to open a browser first.

thank you.

Ok you want to configure your network using Webmin. For that you need a browser. Webmin by default uses port 10000. Anyway you could also configure it manually. For making the changes you should be the super user.

#ifconfig eth0 <ipaddress > netmask <ip address of netmask> up

The other way is to edit the files manually.
Edit the files
#/etc/network/interfaces
#/etc/resolv.conf

After all the changes have been made restart your network.

-Prasanta