"hg commit" - nothing happens!

I think the output of the hg status command is probably telling you that you have a lot of files in your working directory that are not being tracked by Mercurial. You should be able to fix this by running the command

hg addremove

Then you can make your first commit:

hg commit -m "first commit"

Alternatively, you can do this all in one command with

hg commit -A -m "first commit"