I see all these logs being posted but have no idea how to view any of the logs and I have a install problem that tells me to see the config.log. I know this may be a really dumb question but I have searched for two days for the answer! LOL
TIA for any help!

well, you can use any text editor, the easiest are pico and nano, and there is also vim and emacs. if you ahve x running you can use kwrite or gedit, or even gemacs. so if i want to see the reason my x didnt start, i would run...

pico /var/log/Xorg.0.log

and read away. you can also use cat. cat is very powerful for such a minute tool. just run cat with the | more command at the end, so i would run ...

cat /var/log/Xorg.0.log | more

then you can jsut push space and enter to go down.

If you want a nice user friendly gui text editor just use kwrite (either run that as a command or look in the menus) - its installed by default just like the programs edong listed.

If you're having troubling building something from source you might want to post the error message you get here and we'll see if we can help.

However as a first choice for installing software you should use the packaging system. Goto http://easyurpmi.zarb.org and follow the instructions to setup access to the software repositories then goto menu->System->Configuration->Packaging->Install Software, type the name of what you want to install and install it. This avoids all the hassle and difficulty of trying to build things from source.

I like the Less command here. If all you want to do is view the log and not edit it type: less filename. This works better than the more command as less allows you to scroll back and forth. Unless you pipe the more command to something else for output you can only scroll down, not up.

google for
tail -f /var/log/

you sometimes need to have root privelege to access logs,
so may need to become root in a terminal by typing su

finally Mandriva has a GUI in mandrake control center to see the logs
(is it called logview?