[Discuss] Debian "Newbie" Questions

[Murray Strome]

I finally gave up trying to get the prerequisites to Koha working on 
Kubuntu, so I am now loading Debian Sarge and going through all the Perl 
and other prerequisite setup stuff.  However, I am very new to Debian (I 
have been using Mandrake/Mandriva for many years) and am not sure that I 
understand some things.

First, I have installed Debian on a new SATA drive (/dev/sd<n> I 
think).  When I had installed Kubuntu, on the SATA drive,  all my drives 
containing Mandriva stuff were mountable by mount /dev/hd{a or b}<n>.  
However, there are no /dev/hd<n> items listed with my Debian 
installation.  Where are they? In Mandrake, the desktop system 
configuration allows you to see all the drives -- is there something 
equivalent in Debian?

Second, Debian (sarge) has REALLY OLD versions of most applications that 
I use regularly (like OpenOffice, GIMP, K3B and 
Mozilla/Firefox/Thunderbird).  I am not sure what is the best/safest way 
to install the latest stable releases of applications like these in 
Debian.  With Mandriva, I usually tried to find a suitable .rpm file as 
a first step, then used either the command line or the Mandriva software 
package manager.  In some cases (I think Acroread was one) I just used 
the installer that was downloaded from the website.  However, in those 
latter cases, the package manager didn't seem to be aware of them. 

Thanks for any help.

Murray