A bit odd; but a big problem

[Euralis]

Hi guys
For a while now I have been using various linux distros such as red hat, suse and knoppix; however, i just recieved a very low end computer after my motherboard on my good computer fried. I reformatted the hard drive on this "new" computer and so now here I am. I currently am using the latest debian distro however I am having some peculiar problems. I should mention that this is the first time I have ever used debian.
I have tried to install several things on the computer and they did not work, so I went to the debian page and got a list of packages and started testing some out. First I tried the games, since there were alot of them and were very commonly known about; the first of which was "attal". After downloading it I used the GDebi package installer on it by right-clicking it with my mouse and selecting the option, to my suprise it did not work, no error messages or anything. Next I tried "Balazar", this game installed correctly, and unlike "attal" "balazar" showed up in my applications menu under the games. Next I tried to install "amule" (p2p filesharer) and "curl" (the ftp client) neither of which worked. All of the programs that did not work showed the same pattern, they install without a hitch, then fail to show up under the applications menu (atleast I am pretty sure, I dont think it would be a lie to say I have poured over them a dozen times).
After seeing that "balazar" was an exception, I decided to look at its information more closely and see if i could spot anything different about it. The only thing that I noticed was that "balazar" was a game thats version was acceptable for all architectures.
So here is my question, where in Debian do I look to find out what type of architecture this "new" computer is, and second, does this seem like the actual problem to you? If anyone has any answers or questions for that matter, I would like to hear them. I am going to continue to work on this independently, however, until this is resolved, I may be without any new apps.
Thanks guys.

[oz]

So here is my question, where in Debian do I look to find out what type of architecture this "new" computer is,

Go to the command line and enter this command:

uname -a

That should tell you the kernel you are running, the machine architecture, and a bit about your CPU. I'll let someone that is familiar with gdebi answer the package manager questions.

[Euralis]

thanks for your help ozar, anyone care to answer my question with what is going on when using GDebi

[Euralis]

oh, yes, and by the way; it would apear due to ozars kind assistance that I am using an i686 machine. I hope the information is pertinat.

[Euralis]

Further confirming that a big part of my problem is GDebi in this situation; i ran the Gdebi program from the terminal and this is the message that I got:

mikeshome:/home/michael# gdebi-gtk
/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/apt/__init__.py:17: FutureWarning: apt API not stable yet
warnings.warn("apt API not stable yet", FutureWarning)

(gdebi-gtk:3329): libglade-WARNING **: Error loading image: Failed to open file '/usr/share/gdebi/gdebi.png': No such file or directory

(gdebi-gtk:3329): libglade-WARNING **: could not convert string to type `GdkPixbuf' for property `logo'