[newbie] install/tweakfest??

[Gordon Craig]

Thanks to Ken for his reply to my plea. All of the questions he suggests
are valid, especially how to deal with "tar-babies". But this time
particularly I need some tweaking, since my sound card is a SoundBlaster
16 and Linux is convinced it is an AUDIGY (strange, since I never even
heard of that card till it came up as an error message on the boot page
of my Mandrake 9.0 Linux. So I would really like to see an install/tweak
fest included wherever we have the session,relatively soon! I wouldn't
even want to hint at what I spent trying to get a functional sound card;
and things are as quiet as before the big $$'s.

It would also be nice to be able to run SOMETHING that didn't come in
the distro; so let's see/hear more about tar-balls and RPM's and
suchlike.

Gordon.