help a poor newbie

Ok, here are my newbie plights,

1) I cant get my supermount to work in Mandrake 7, however I read that
Mandrake sets CD-R's (my main cd drive is one) to IDE by default and they
need to be set to SCSI (SCSI emulation? dunno Ich bin neubie)

2) My ISA USR 56k modem connects at 115 in winblows but only 4900 in
Mandrake, how can I tweak this??

3) In Mandrake, after I connect to the internet with KPPP I cant open any
new applications, including a terminal window or KFM, until I discinnect
from my KPPP connection, is this normal???


Thank you very much in advance, if I can get mandrake working well enough I
can convince my company to begin serving their sites with linux/Apache.

- Joel