I, too, am a newbie with Linux and have been in the Windows world far too long. I am trying to install Firefox and Thunderbird onto a Fedora Core 2 distro and am experiencing similar problems.

I do not believe you had your main question answered and I share that same question somewhat. I, too, want to use the GUI to get around at first. My variation on your question is...If I am running an installer under a GUI (such as Firefox 1.0PR) and it prompts me for a location to install into, where is the best place for such applications to be installed? I know that there are directories like /bin, /usr, etc., but which is the best to be used for installations of miscellaneous applications like Firefox. By misc. apps I am referring to those which are not part of a distro like apache, MySQL, etc.

I am so accustomed to the Windows world of "program files" or a dir of my choice but I can easily find the executable from wherever I installed it and can make a shortcut for it anywhere. I am looking for such insite with Linux. All help is much appreciated. Thanks in advance.