I'm a networking student and have pretty much conquered windows 2000, so now it's time for linux.
anyways a month or so ago i played with mandrake 8.1 for a day or 2 and got confused so i quit.

so today i installed red hat 7.2 and once again i'm confused.

haha
, just saw this smilie:

that would be me.

so anyways i went to download.com and came across doom for linux 1.8, and exclaimed "sweet" but it.s a .gz file, which i figured out(i think) to be a compressed file.
so i looked for compression utilities on download.com and found a few, one i found was an .exe which i couldn't execute and some other .gz files. so being a complete newbie to linux i have no idea what's going on.

what is the story here?

thanks

also i'd like to set up redhat to be a http server on my lan, is this difficult to set up?

the setup shouldn't be difficult at all - but your best bet is to either buy a distro - (red hat and mandrake are the two most newbe-friendly) or download one - it's much easier to get started that way, and you can learn how linux fits together by playing around with configurations. setting up an http server on linux is as easy as it gets. all you need to do is run apache. i had one running on my box for six months before i ever bothered to play around with it.

you should already have the tools to unpack gz files. try typing gunzip -h , or gzip -h

hmmm are those gz files u mentioned tar.gz files ? of tgz files?
do extract and install tarballs (tar.gz) to this in console:
let's say
tar zxvf dooml.tar.gz
cd doom
u won't see any .exe's because they simply do not run on linux (.exe is win32 binary)
most of the time u have to do this:
./configure
make
make install (as root user)
if the install comes correctly do:
make clean to get rid of all the junk.

p.s. I don't know what's inside the .gz file of doom u mentioned, this is just a guess.

yeah they are tar.gz files

so i need to do it from the command line then?

thats no problem, i'm no stranger to the command line, just need to know some commands, i think i've got a command reference around here somewhere ...

With Redhat, Mandy and most recent distros, you don't need to type nothing.

Just double-click the file in your folder. Archiver will pop open. It's like WinZip, which I quit a long ago BTW. In RH 7.2/3 for example, the function is built into Konq (file manager). You just have to double-click, it'll unzip in cache and let you view, then you can copy the folder elsewhere. The unzipping is done auto.

if i doubleclick the tar.gz file i get an error saying that nautilus doesn't have an installed viewer or something.

anyways, i really know nothing about linux, anyone recommend a book or anywhere else to get some basics?
i really don't want to bog you down with my newbie questions that i should be able to figure out pretty easily