Am looking for a program like "photoshop" that will let me edit text data with hyper links embedded within an old gif file? Need to be able to update file for Web Site.

Did you try Gimp? It's included with most distros. If it's not installed then check what ever package manager what ever distro you are using has. I don't know if Gimp does what you want since I don't have an gif files to hand and don't understand exactly what you're describing by 'text data with hyper links embedded'.

Mmmm I am not quite sure what do you mean.

You can't -as far as I know- embed hyperlinks or any other kind of data into a gif image. If my memory serves correctly, GIF is just a bitmap format with LZW compression, nothing else. If you see text, it should actually be part of the image (or separate text into the web page, in which case you should be editing the html code instead), and not a separate text object. Vector types like SVG or CDR files allow separate objects, but bitmaps are just collections of pixels, nothing else.

I am not a master in graphics formats, so I might be missing something. However, maybe you can serve us a sample GIF file so we know what do you mean.

For the rest, I also recommend the gimp for the task.

first you can not embed a link in a gif but in the html code you can put a gif image as a link.
Or use ImageMagick and java,php to "on the fly" make a gif image that is a link with text from the data base.
gimp will edit the VERY,very,very old 8bit ( 255 colors) .gif .The last web site I wrote I used 24 bit .png's ( ie6, and maybe ie7, did not support 32 bit png's .However ALL other browsers do.)Also a bit of java and ImageMagick " magic" to get transparent png's in to IE6

I think OP is talking about "image maps" - i.e. in HTML you can declare several invisible polygonal shapes within image and specify different link for each shape. I think photoshop really had tool for creating "image maps", but I have no idea about Linux alternative for photoshop's tool. I'd make them in any text editor.

I see. Some kind of fancy stuff like fireworks/dreamweaber like to do. I didn't think of those because I have the odd idea that code should be written into a text editor and not drawn into a photo retouch program :P

To do this with css is just a breeze. I don't know of any tool that will do that in linux. However, most versions of photoshop, fireworks and dreamweaber should work just ok under wine.

An alternative to Gimp for an image editor is Krita. Both are pretty good programs in my opinion.

If you are looking for an image map editor, try kimagemapeditor (part of kdewebdev). As for Photoshop replacements, Krita and GIMP are your best bets.

Gimp can make a clickable "image map"
a photo with parts that are clickable in html
but doing this in a text editor is BEST