Am I in the right place for help?

[Jed Daniels <jedd@mdmgr.com>]

Hello,
    I'm not sure that I'm sending these questions to the correct
address, if they were sent to you incorrectly, please let me know. (If
you know the correct person/people to send them to, that would be
appreciated.)
    I recently installed Debian Linux on my PC, and the initial
installation went great. But now I'm stuck with a few different issues,
and haven't been able to find answers to my questions in any of the
FAQ's. I am having several problems...where should I begin? I have
Debian installed on a second harddrive on my computer, the first drive
contains a Windows 95 partition that I use to access the internet. When
I am in Linux, i can ping addresses on the local subnets, but I can not
seem to configure things correctly so that I can FTP to other sites.
What else other than the gateway information do I need so that I can
ftp? what I have been trying to do as a work around is to download files
from the ftp site on my windows disk, and then mount the disk from my
Linux disk and install them that way. But I run into several problems...
some of the files I download have .exe extensions when the file
description says it shoud be .deb. hence, linux won't reckognize them
for install. I've tried renaming them, but that does not correct the
problem. But when they do come down with the proper .deb extensions,
dselect can't see to reckognize them to install. One thing that I really
need is the Man pages, the other is information on how to access the www
or ftp sites through my gateway. (I tried downloading lynx, but couldn't
get it to install correctly.)
Any help anyone could provide would be greatly appreciated, I've got a
few other problems, but I think I can work those out. If you recieved
this message in error, please disreguard it and accept my humble
apologies for bothering you or wasting your time.
Thank you very much,

Jed Daniels