Ohhh, boy do I hate being a newbie..., I did ask for Linux... starting to regret it now... Options

[WakeRider]

I have been using Fedora on a Gateway laptop since January.

I have very little idea what I'm doing here. Like, almost none. Downloading and installing programs, especially, is driving me up the wall, because I somehow managed to get Firefox and GIMP working... but how did I do that?! How do I recreate the miracle?! @_@ What I want are various GIMP addons, mtpaint, xchat, and so on... I keep reading that these are available in the distro, but while I _think_ I know what that means, I don't know how to ...do whatever it is I'm supposed to do now.

I'm sure this would all make a lot more sense if I'd been the person to install the OS, but sadly, that was my brother. Who maybe/maybe not knows how to do this, but in any case lives a few thousand miles away right now. HELP!

[michaelk]

Fedora package management system is called yum and the GUI interface is called the yum extender. It will allow you to search for packages and add ons and install them easily.

[WakeRider]

Fedora package management system is called yum and the GUI interface is called the yum extender. It will allow you to search for packages and add ons and install them easily.

...What does that mean, functionally? How do I access and use it?

[michaelk]

MainMenu->System Tools->Yumex
http://www.yum-extender.org/cms/node/3

There are basically two ways to install applications, source and via a package manager. By source meaning you download the source code ], compile install it etc. etc. The problems with installing from source is that you need to take care of any dependencies on your own. By dependencies I mean any libraries or other applications that need to be installed before you install the desired application. The second is via the distribution's package manager. All dependencies are taken care of for you as well as all the compile options are preconfigured as well as any init scripts.