Repetier and RepRapPro Mendel

Hi, I'm relatively new to all this and have built a RepRapPro Mendel.
I have been running it with Pronterface and Skeinforge on a Raspberry PI. I've been getting list of problems to fix from part orientation, settings and limit switches just not working, to the printer just not using the x axis during the print and dumping all the extruded material on a single line along the y axis. I was planning on starting again from scratch and maybe using an all in one software such as Repetier but I tried from my laptop just to see and cant get it to communicate with the printer and cant get it to slice properly (Skeinforge again) so as to upload the gcode file for printing.

Any advice on the matter would be great,

Thanks very much......