First, my thanks to Jason, John, Fergus, and Donn for their/your patient advice. I've noted the comments on what I might do with Konsole; I'll attend to them later and reply (if need be) in a different thread. Me:
Righty-ho, what do I do with the fonts therein?
I tried again, and this time it was pretty obvious via the control center. I don't know why yesterday I couldn't get the install module to look in any directory. I did know that a lot of fonts were in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/truetype/ and was tempted just to plonk them there, but wondered if that was a place reserved for fonts that were already installed. Anyway, today I was able to get it to look elsewhere, and it all went fairly smoothly. (Again, some parts weren't obvious, but I'll spare you a blow-by-blow as we'd all fall asleep and anyway I didn't take notes.) John says: [oh, again I couldn't copy and paste! Second attempt:]
Maybe, but if any of them are 'new' to you, you'd have just as much trouble learning, unless you just dig in and start 'doing' things. Click buttons, look and see what's around in there, what does 'this' do, hmmm... wonder what'll happen if I click that....etc, etc.
That's exactly how I found my way around other, erm, operating environments. But I'd (wrongly?) got the impression that although this might be a harmless way to try out (most!) programs, it wasn't good for installation in KDE/GNU/Linux. After all, there's a lot of talk of how one's better off using a SuSE-specific rpm to install software unless one knows what one's doing (and I'm painfully aware that I don't know what I'm doing). For fonts specifically, I installed Trebuchet MS and Georgia (copied over from my 'doze laptop) a month or so back via some carefree method (which I've now forgotten); perhaps as a result of that method, both fonts look atrocious in Konqueror and Mozilla (though they're fine in OOo), and I'd noted that there's a Sourceforge project http://sourceforge.net/projects/corefonts/ that "consists of a source rpm that can be used to easily create a binary rpm package that, when installed, gives access to Microsoft's TrueType core fonts for the Web", which (perhaps wrongly) suggested to me that TrueType fonts need some kind of special treatment. (Come to think of it, perhaps all it does is extract the fonts from the .EXE files in which they're M$-specifically compressed.)
cd to the directory where you downloaded the fonts su to root. cp *.ttf /usr/lib/X11/fonts/truetype/ fonts-config
That's the kind of procedure I prefer. I am happy to have got wget to work yesterday without boring this mailing list with a single question; I enjoyed looking through the list of options, typing wget --random-wait -nH -E -r -l5 -k -p -np http://somethingorother/ and watching it all come tumbling in.
Urgh. Maybe I should have settled for "Lindows" or that other OS
Nah. You'll love it.
I hope so (and wget re-whetted my appetite). I'm not giving up yet.
I know at least 30 people who've had computers for anywhere between 1 and 3 years, and *still* don't know anything but how to read email and surf the web.
I know, I know. I've known some who won't copy and paste; they prefer to retype. A couple of years ago, when I was still occasionally using diskettes, someone here needed half a dozen or so in a hurry and found that we'd accidentally bought a box of unformatted ones. I was in a rush so I did not offer to do it for her. Instead, not remembering (or seeing any advantage in) a 'doze GUI alternative, I fired up FORMAT at the control line, and (trying hard and successfully not to yawn) walked her through the process with the *first* diskette. She's Japanese; the prompts were in Japanese; I explained in Japanese. As you may remember, you're asked if you want to format another (Y/N) and so forth -- all pretty elementary. But she was totally stumped by the second diskette; I had to re-explain such techie esoterica as that "press any key" [in Japanese] means, well, "press any key" . . . etc. etc.