i purchased one of these eee pc notebooks. i want to install software to run flash files, everything says open the dialog box. What dialog box, the only thing i can find close is the add/install new software page, but this insists and only allows ASUS or DEBIAN ( .eap ; . deb) packages. This is not what i have found on the internet.

If your distro has a repository you should always check that first to be sure what you need isn't already packaged for you there.

Sometimes it isn't. In those cases you'll often get a file with a "tar.gz" or ".tgz". at the end of name. That is a gzipped tar archive file. You can see what is in it by typing "tar tvzf <filename>".

Usually such a file creates a directory and has all its contents in that directory on extract. You could put it somewhere (e.g. /root) then run "tar xzf <filename>" to extract that into a subdirectory under that location.

Once you've done that you can cd to the new subdirectory and look for files that tell you how to do the install (e.g. README, README.first) which are ASCII files that tell you how to proceed.

Please see http://forum.eeeuser.com and http://wiki.eeeuser.com
for much useful information about the EEE range of linux PCs