beginner - rewriting URLs from ?p=

I am using PHP on my first site and am trying to figure out how to get
the
server to rewrite the URLs before I put it online. The testing folder
that
contains my new PHP files is at
www.thesouthbeachhostel.com/on-hold/index.php. The original site at
www.thesouthbeachhostel.com is just regular HTML with no PHP includes.

In the final site I want the URLs to look like this:
www.thesouthbeachhostel.com/hostel-links.com instead of like this:
http://www.thesouthbeachhostel.com/i...p=hostel-links. This is
important
because I have other outside links already pointing to those pages.

I found the following article online (I attached the relevant parts
below).
It is a little beyond me and I was wondering if someone could offer a
little
assistance.

I don't want a folder like
http://www.thesouthbeachhostel.com/h...stel-links.com -- I just want it
to be
as so: the future page
http://www.thesouthbeachhostel.com/i...?p=rooms-rates
should become www.thesouthbeachhostel.com/rooms-rates.htm

Thanks in advance for any help people can offer. I can't understand
everthing in the following article. How do I make it do what I want?
How
does one log into the server to make Linux commands?

---------------------------------------------------------------
Excerpt from Dan Zarrella 2003 Stargeek Studios
http://www.stargeek.com
Making dynamic pages look static without mod_rewrite
A way to mask bulky dynamic page URLs (and avoid the question mark
delay) is
Apache's ForceType in combination with a PHP command to interpret URLs
like:
www.example.com/books/computers.html as referring to a page called
"books"
which is executed as a PHP script (I usually make a link on the linux
server
from "books.php" to "book" to make editing the script easier). The
function
will return an array of the additional values, including the category
"computers". This can be accomplished by inserting a line like this
into the
..htaccess file in the root of your web documents directory:

<Files *Directory Handle Name Here*> ForceType application/x-httpd-php
</Files>
*Directory Handle Name Here* should be replaced with the alias name you
are
giving to the fake directory you are creating. In this example:

www.example.com/books/computers.html
your .htaccess line would look like this:

<Files books>ForceType application/x-httpd-php</Files>
You can then log into your server and create a link to the file "books"
or
whatever directory alias you have choosen. This is done with the linux
command "ln", or link, like this:

$ Ln books.php books
This creates a link between the existing PHP script books.php and the
non-existant "books". This way all requests for the directory "books"
will
be given to books.php, ie www.example.com/books/computers.html would be
handled by books.php

Inside books.php you can use this function (available here) to extract
values from the static-looking request URI's: