Joseph, I'm sorry, but you should really open your own thread. By executables, do you mean windows programs? Because if that's the case, then you cannot run those on linux in a standard fashion.

By terminal I mean command line. They have a great documentation page to take you step by step through it. When you first install the operating system, you will have to type everything in to get it working. After you install the additional packages you should be fine, and will boot into a normal system.

If that sounds too hard, then take a look at this. http://www.archbang.org/
You will want to go to downloads and choose the ArchBang 2010.05 32-bit (2010-05-11) main iso.

Arch Linux is all you need. They have great documentation and make it easy to install a full OS. If you feel somewhat comfortable with terminal, then go ahead and give it a shot. It's a rolling release, so you never have to install from a disk again. The distro when downloaded is only about 324MB.

Linux Mint is great for new people, because it has nearly everything a beginner would need: Codecs, a friendly community, stability, flashplayer, java, etc.

I would have to recommend to look on ubuntu forums for troubleshooting, and the archlinux documentation pages for when the user wants to delve deeper into linux and wants to know how things work.

Hey, I know what you're going through, and a lot of people have problems with this.

I would download Ubuntu for netbooks, which will be your linux distribution http://www.ubuntu.com/netbook/get-ubuntu/download
If you click on the "show me how" button, there will be several instructions that make everything simple.

After you have put ubuntu on your flash drive, reboot your computer and look for a prompt at the very beginning that says "boot options" or "boot menu" or "boot devices". Hit the corresponding key, and choose the usb option with the arrow and enter keys.

Then the rest should be fairly straight forward. Feel free to post if you need more help.