Download and Install Programs, How is it done?? Options

[gtoman]

I just installed SuSE 9.3 so I'm new to it. I need to know how to download files from websites either to burn them onto CD's and then install them on the hard drive or install directly onto the hard drive after downloads. Every website I've been to has folders with their names and the creation date. How do you download and install these programs? What are ISO and RPM type files? Do you have to know Linux commands to install them or do they install by themselves?
Thanks,Jim

[michaelk]

RPM - Redhat Package Manager, It is system for managing installed software. An application is usually compiled for a particular distribution with man pages, module dependicies, version information etc bundled into a single file. I'm not a SuSE expert but yast is probably capable of installing rpms.
http://www.rpm.org/

ISO - International Organization for Standardization. The standard for how data filesystem is written to a CD is ISO9660. So a file that has an iso extension is typically a binary byte for byte copy of a CD. The filesystem for CDs is iso9660. Typically, linux distributions are saved in an ISO format so you can download, create a CD and then install.
http://www.iso.org/iso/en/ISOOnline.frontpage

You will also see files with extensions tar, tgz or tar,gz. These are archives (similar to windows zip) and are the source code. One has to compile and configure the application to run on your system.
This is requires knowledge of the console terminal and shell commands.
There are other package management tools.

k3b is the easiest CD burning GUI. You download files just like windows. The do not install themselves.