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Have you looked into the official documentation?

There is lots of helpful documentation available at the official Debian website. Take a look!

How to install new software?

Debian etch comes with more than 15000 packages, with only 600 or so installed on a default desktop install. You can either use "aptitude" on the command-line to install more packages or "synaptic" from the gnome menu.

I cannot read DVDs - why?

For legal reasons libdvdcss is not included in Debian. If you are a legitimate or legal user of libdvdcss you can add http://www.debian-multimedia.org (see instructions there) to your /etc/apt/sources.list which contains the libdvdcss2 package. Alternativly the package is also available at http://www.debian-unofficial.org.

How do I enable suspend and resume?

How can I view webpages which contain flash?

Iceweasel has an option to install the plugin automatically, that should do the trick. Altought there are another ways to view flash animations/videos.

via aptitude / apt-get / synaptic

on a console do the following (as root, or using sudo):

aptitude install flashplugin-nonfree

Once downloaded the package itself will download the plugin by Adobe (install_flash_player_9_linux.tar.gz), untar it and install to your browser folder.

Note: Non-free repositories should be availables on your /etc/apt/sources.list

manually

Go to Adobe.com ( http://www.adobe.com/shockwave/download/index.cgi?P1ProdVersion=ShockwaveFlash&P2_Platform=Linux ) and download the flash plugin compressed as tar.gz, and decompress it.

$ wget  http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/get/flashplayer/current/install_flash_player_9_linux.tar.gz 
$ tar xzvf install_flash_player_9_linux.tar.gz

Once there, should be a script to install the plugin: flashplayer-installer

$ cd install_flash_player_9_linux
$ ./flashplayer-installer

By doing that, the script should tell you to close the browsers, and will attempt to install to your browser directory. If not, you should copy libflashplayer.so manually to your browser's directory.

For Example:

$ cp libflashplayer.so /home/johndoe/.mozilla/firefox/plugins/

Now you should be able to re-open your browser and watch flash animations / videos.

Note: Both ways to install flash on debian described above works on 32bits. In Debian 64bits are other ways to do so.