You can right-click on the Panel and add a shortcut to gnome-terminal, if you can't find it under the Gnome menu (it's under Accessories in Ubuntu)

I think you can install most common packages pretty easily in Fedora using the yum system.

If you have an nVidia card, dual monitor support is in the driver setting program (nvidia-settings) after you install them. You might be SOL with an ATI card, 'cause their Linux support is currently e. There's supposed to be an improved re-write coming up, but don't expect that until 2008.

If you want the drives to mount at every boot, this should tell you what you need. Once you've added your other partitions to it, running
Code:
mount -a
as root will mount all the filesystems you just defined in fstab.

Alternatively if you just want to mount them for the single session, you can follow this guide:
How to mount partitions and filesystems in Linux