Argh! Need help with make and packages!
 

Hi, experts! I searched but didn't find this question, but I know it must be asked by every newbie...

How do I install make and it's dependencies without having make and its dependencies available?

Background and details:

So I've worked on Unix/Linux machines every day at work for the past 10 years, but I'm not on the administrative side.

Now I'm trying to get Puppy working on my new laptop. I'm really frustrated trying to get things installed. My wireless card Linux driver instructions say to use "make" and "make install". Those result in a command not found error, and I read that I have to install those packages first.

So I try to install make, and it tells me that it's got a couple dependencies, and each of those has a couple, and they have a couple more and a couple more. Maybe that's exaggerating, but I don't think so. So I tried to push through it by downloading the gz.tar files in Windows, unzipping and trying to install using the Puppy package manager, or whatever it's called, but there's no .deb file in those tar files, so it tells me I'm out of luck.

Really, there must be a better way. How do you guys do this? What's the secret?

Thanks! It looks like I won't get through this without you guys!

Steve.

Another comment:

Maybe Puppy's not the best for me. I like it. It seems fast and simple, but I'm open to suggestions. This will be almost entirely used for surfing the internet and maybe playing some online television sometimes in Flash Player.

My laptop has 3GB DDR3 RAM and an AMD V 2.20GHZ processor.

Is Puppy a good fit for me? If another distribution has make already installed, that would be nice. I'm open to any advice!

Thanks.
Steve.

Well, since Puppy seems to be trying to be a small distro that can fit on minimal hardware, you might be better served by a more full-fledged distro. You've certainly got the hardware to run any distro out there.

For starting out, one of the *buntus or Linux Mint are usually decent choices. They are all based on Debian, so if you want a bit more of a challenge, move up the tree. If you're already familiar with the distro at work, that would be a decent idea (whatever that distro may be). Most of the Debian descendants handle dependency resolution well, so if that is something important, head in that direction.

And of course if your up for a slight challenge, nothing beats Slackware, but you are resolving your dependencies yourself, the way <INSERT FAVORITE DEITY HERE> intended.

Don't try to install things by hand. Use a wired network and the package manager. If you can't get the wired network to work either try using something like apt-offline.

Another option is to go for a more newb friendly distro like ubuntu.

Cheers,

Evo2.

Hanggog42, thank you!

That's helpful.

I use RedHat at work, but I think I read you have to pay for a license to use that. Anything out there resemble RedHat?

I'm up for a medium-challenge. I like computers, and I'm fairly literate in DOS and Windows and know the basic commands for navigating, copying, moving, changing permissions, etc in Linux, so I should be able to pick it up fairly well. It's all pretty daunting right now. Perhaps because things just aren't built into Puppy, like you said.

I definitely don't mind learning some things to get this to work, but I'm really looking forward to getting on the web and having it working. So I need an in-between distro (user-friendly but not so simple that it loses important functionality). And if make doesn't come with it, I'll still need to know how to get it!

Thanks.
Steve.

Evo2, thanks.

apt-offline? What's that?

Thanks.
Steve.

Oh, I also want to dual-boot or CD-boot so I can still use the Windows 7 installation that came on the laptop. So that might matter in my distro decision.

Thanks.
Steve.

This web site: http://www.linux.com/learn/docs/ldp/...utions-for-you

says that openSUSE is good for laptops because of WIFI, docking, and monitor switching capabilities.

Is it Debian based? Is it a good choice for someone like me who has experience using Linux but not so much on the admin side?

Thanks.
Steve.

http://apt-offline.alioth.debian.org/

However I was under the impression that puppy uses debs and apt, if not then please ignore this suggestion.

Cheers,

Evo2.

AFAIK opensuse is a pretty pretty solid distro. It is *not* Debian based. IIRC it was a fork from slackware but uses rpm packages.


Cheers,

Evo2.

Yes Red Hat Enterprise Linux does require a license, but they also put out Fedora for free. Keep in mind that Fedora is their testing ground for RHEL, so things break occasionally. However, there are a couple of clones of RHEL, with CentOS being the most notable. CentOS is an exact copy of RHEL minus all the Red Hat logos. The thing to keep in mind about RHEL and its clones is that it is primarily aimed at the server market so some of the desktop bells and whistles may not be there.

I haven't played with openSuse for a bit, but I was impressed when I did. It sort of occupies the same role as Fedora in that it tends to be a bit of a testing ground for Suse Enterprise Linux.

From what you've said here, I would lean towards Ubuntu or Linux Mint. Both come as live CDs and are aimed at desktop use. They also have good package management systems and a boatload of software in their repositories. They also tend to be pretty good at helping to partition your disk should you decided to dual boot. I'd spend some quality time researching how to get Windows 7 and Linux to co-exist before you partition your disk though.