gcc is the c compiler in linux. But if you download a driver it will give you a script called configure, so unzip and untar the driver change dir to the driver dir then give the folloing commands
./configure
./make
su make install
there the driver is installed if you see no error messages in the above three stages. The make file will automatically compile the drivers and make install will install them
by the way now that you are into linux the best way to learn things is to read posts on various linux fourms.