par Patrick Stack.
Thanks for your reply Ken.
I ran git on the server via ssh as root second time round using the command git command as found in the Installation instructions on the Moodle website i.e.
git clone -b MOODLE_25_STABLE git://git.moodle.org/moodle.git
while in the /var/www directory and it seemed to download fine (with the right file size and all). However nothing happened after that - no moodle directory was created as it says will happen in the instructions. So I ran the uncompress command: tar -zxvf moodle_latest.tgz (I forget the exact filename) with the results as outlined in my first post.
Perhaps I'm missing a step?