On Sun, Oct 21, 2007 at 08:36:29PM -0000, Ed wrote: > Hi Jude, > > You might be on to something here. I took the old computer out of its > cubby hole and opened it up and just 'looked' inside. I didn't re-seat > anything, just looked. I put it back, reconnected all cables, and went > to lunch. When I returned, I logged onto one of my other computers, and > used the broswer to look at the log for the router. To my surprise, it > showed some entries from the old computer, so I went over to the old > computer and tried to ping Berkeley and to my further surprise, Burkeley > answered. So I fired up Firefox on the old computer and it connected to > www.debian.org. It has been working now with no problems for about three > hours. I really didn't fix it, but it is working. Of course, if there > is something that is loose, or intermittent, or damaged, it is going to > fail again soon, but at the moment, it is working. That's really strange ... > As you can tell, I am not experienced with Debian. My next goal is to > get gcc and all its support (emacs, make, various compilers and > assemblers) loaded onto this old machine. I imagine I can read and > figure out where and how to do this, but if this is a no brainer for you, > and you care to give me a receipe (step by step procedure) for doing it, > that would be great. If not, no problem, I'll figure it out. First thing check /etc/apt/sources.list You should uncomment security lines (commented out by the installer) and add a line like this: deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian etch main contrib non-free After you're done run 'aptitude update' to get the newest package lists and 'aptitude upgrade' to get the latest security updates. (Note: if you get an error on the first update run just do it again). After you are finished with this you can fire up aptitude (without any arguments it will go in interactive mode) and look for packages to install (you might want to run a "Forget all new" from the Actions menu first). Aptitude also has a great README in /usr/share/doc/aptitude/ The debian reference suggested by Jude is a very good place to start learning about Debian, and for individual packages the first thing to read is /usr/share/doc/packagename/README.Debian Regards, Andrei -- If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough. (Albert Einstein)
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