Our company had a vendor doing some data transformation work for us that we recently decided to take in house. They were good enough to transfer all their processes to a pc we gave them and it's running great. Only thing is that its a linux OS and I have no idea how to do anything other than what to click on to run programs.

Its OS version 2.6.34.8-68.fc13.i686.PAE. KDE SC version:4.5.5

I know that at the bottom left where there would be a windows button on a Windows PC there is a blue K button. That's ALL I know.

First thing I'd like to know is how to totally back up this system OS and all so that if something happens I can load it onto another PC. I'm pretty panicked because it IS an old pc it's on. Then, I'd like to know what is this exactly and how can I learn what I have here

Hope someone can help, i'm as lost as lost gets

Thanks!!

You can find out about Fedora here
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_Project_Wiki
http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/index.html

Information on KDE is here:
http://docs.kde.org/

If they have given you any custom software you obviously need to back that up. Otherwise, all your data all lives in the directory /home/username/. Run a terminal from the menu and enter the command
man rsync
That will show you a very simple way to back-up data to removable media or to another computer over a network.

Also look into full-backup solutions such as Clonezilla:

www.clonezilla.org

This will allow you to completely restore the computer to its current state if something goes very wrong!

DavidMcCann has some good links to get you started learning Fedora, good luck!

If you want to start learning the command line and how it works inside, try these tutorials:

http://linuxcommand.org/
http://rute.2038bug.com/

Unlike Windows, which has a built-in GUI and desktop, the desktop and GUI are optional in Linux and not intergrated into the OS itself. And there are many desktops to choose from, including KDE (which is probably the one you have, as the "K" icon in the panel indicates).