i've almost got my SuSe9 machine just like i want it. jsut need to figure out palm m125 usb install, but, is there anyway to burn this setup i have to a image bootable disk using Norton ghost or Drive image?. and also is there a command that can tell me what type of file system i have?

Run 'mount' To see info on mounted filesystems. I think Ghost and DriveImage can make images, but I don't think they will be bootable. Simple bootable Linux cds work like this:

image of Linux install on cd
floppy image file used to boot.
kernel on floppy image uses initialization ramdisk to mount the image of the Linux.
booting continues as it would on a hd.

The image is a loopback file. Any file big enough to carry your data will do. You then format it, then mount it as loopback:
mount /big_file.img /mnt/image -o loop
Then you copy everything into it:
mount [root partition] /mnt/source
cp -a /mnt/source/* /mnt/image
Then you have the image of your stuff in a file that can be used for a bootable cd. Bootable cds like Knoppix cram extra stuff in using special compression.