Right now, of course, I'm emeshed in learning bunches of newbie stuff. I still don't know how to use Linux FTP yet, for example. Or deal with anything (tar file) I do download.

Try ncftp... It's a little easier to use than standard FTP. I always used the Win95 command line FTP so when I got to Linux I really didn't notice much of a difference.

Some hints:

ftp ftp.yourmachine.com	open the connection. Substitute the computer that you are connecting to in place of yourmachine.com .
user anonymous	To get access to public stuff
password name@domain.com	standard password for anon ftp = email address
cd /pub/linux	change directory on remote machine to /pub/linux
lcd /tmp	change directory on local machine to /tmp
binary	set binary transfer mode - many FTP servers default to sending everything as ASCII
get linux.tar.gz	Copies the file to your local machine
bye	Quits the FTP session

You can use 'help' to get a list of keywords. FTP is a little odd in that different servers may behave a little differently. Much like a shell session, when you FTP to a site the commands and whatnot are more dependent on the site you connected to than your local system...

Then, you can use tar like this:

tar xvfz linux.tar.gz

which means 'x' Extract the tar 'f' File in 'v' Verbose mode but first 'z' gunzip it.

personally, I tend to gunzip it first and then 'tar xvf' the .tar file.

 - Eric

For more on tar.