User Feedback :: A little lost.

Hi all...I am 5-6 hrs new to linux (this is my first distro)

So far dsl has been working great and I have successfully accessed both my external dvd-rw and 80 gb usb drive. I went from live cd to a direct hd install (didn't want to try frugal yet.)

Anyway I am completely lost when it comes to the commands for add-on programs.

I first tried to add gaim but when i tried to compile it I was told in the terminal screen i have no gcc compiler..(I don't know where I can get this or if it is already included in dsl and i haven't found it.

*then I found a gaim through myDSL but saw I needed gtk2. I downloaded gtk2-0705.unc from another website but i have no idea how to install this either. it is on my sys at cd /home/dsl gtk2-0705.unc

sorry for the long post..I know there is a learning curve but this is my biggest hurdle and any help would be appreciated.

gtk2 is in mydsl as well

If you want to load it by command-line, you can use
mydsl-load gtk2-0705.unc

See http://damnsmalllinux.org/wiki/index.php/MyDSL:_Installing_Extensions (among other docs) for more info

Thanks...the links helped me out alot

Quote (ny2cali @ Feb. 25 2007,14:03)

Since you're using the traditional hard drive install, you should go ahead and enable apt and use apt-get (command line) or synaptic (GUI) add new programs from the debian pool. By default, you'll be set up for "old stable" repositories rather than the latest and greatest. I don't advise changing it because you're very likely to run into bigger, more serious issues.

There's a command in the menu (under tools) to enable apt in older versions of DSL (<3.2?). In more recent versions you'll need to download dsl-dpkg.unc from the DSL repository, etc.

Quote

I first tried to add gaim but when i tried to compile...

DSL doesn't come with a C compiler, and you're going to have lots of dependencies to compile first if you want to go the route of downloading and compiling from source recent versions of GUI programs like that. An older GTK1 version of Gaim is available in Debian old stable pool, and you've already found the shiny happy GTK2 version in the DSL repository.

Quote

There's a command in the menu (under tools) to enable apt in older versions of DSL (<3.2?). In more recent versions you'll need to download dsl-dpkg.unc from the DSL repository, etc.

The menu item in question has always been a download script for dsl-dpkg.dsl from the system repository, followed by the obligatory apt-get update

When oldstable was removed from the Debian mirrors, this script became broken and therefore removed starting with v3.2. It was much easier to perform an adhoc change to the dsl-dpkg.dsl extension than to change the four images of DSL.

However, now that Debian has a permanent home for "Woody" the download script can once again be enabled as the download target is once again stable.

Look for this in v3.3RC2

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