1. Sound, that is weird that your sound plays CD, plays the test sound which I think is a wav file but midi doesn't play. I personally have never tried playing midi sounds in Linux, someone else might have an answer for you on that one. Once connected to the internet you could either download new drivers for your card or maybe a better program to play those types of files.
2. Well I am sure coming out of a Redhat book, your running Redhat. You can change your resolution by using Xconfigurator at the command line. Either that or you can use the xf86config to configure all your resolution needs.
3. The little penguin might be right, it could be a WINMODEM, did you check to see if it was or know if it is? If it is, you might be out of luck, hence the name WINmodem, it was made for windows. Try
http://www.linmodems.org, they have a list of winmodems that actually work within Linux. If its not a winmodem, we should be able to get that sucker working.
4. at the command line, you would do this to mount a floppy.
# mount -t msdos /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy
# cd /mnt/floppy
# ls -l
Then you should be in the floppy directory and then go from there.
Any problems, shout back.