Linux Project - the first steps

So now I have Linux on my computer and my initial response was positive.  I like the way it looks and there is certainly at least some familiarity.  So what to do first?

I've heard so many people talk about Firefox and how much better it is than Internet Explorer.  I decide to look at that and to see if there is an upgrade.  There is an upgrade so I try to download.  I first choose to not save to disk but to just open and that doesn't work.  I try again and save to disk.  Now I have a folder on my desktop. I look all over the place for an installation program but don't find any.  I search on the Internet for Installation instructions.  Mostly they have instructions for installing to Windows.  I do find some instructions that say save to \usr\local or something.  I find that and try to cut and paste but I'm told I can't do that...bummer.  I try to get root access with my root password but that doesn't work.  I can load the Firefox program out of this folder, oh by the way I did an unzip or whatever you call it in Linux and got the folder extracted out of the download so that's were I was able to find the program and start it up (with one error message on start up but it works).

In some of the instructions I saw a warning that installing this program would overwrite my older version but actually I still have that version so I don't know what's up.  I figure - what I'll do is --uninstall the original version of firefox.  I do that and then I get errors on startup and my network cards don't work any more, or I guess they work but I can't get to the configuration info for them so I can't resolve my wireless card not working issue or even try to connect to my wireless network.

Looks like I really messed it up this time so I figure I'm not too far into this thing I'll just wipe out and reload the Linux software again from DVD.  So I did exactly that and I must say that the third time to reload the operating system went pretty smooth.  I'm an old pro at it by now.  So that's enough for now, I'll tell you more later.