You might be able to use one of them. First, you need to know whether your distribution is a 'knock-off' of one of the major distributions, particularly Suse or Mandrake. If it is a close enough match, then you should be okay. It will not address the issue of missing libraries, though. I guess it is worth a try; if there are missing dependencies, RPM will tell you when you try to do the installation.

--- rod.

puppy is an original distro as far as i know. the creator built it from the ground up.

which one of those libraries at the rpm site do i need to download?

It is virtually impossible to tell. I doubt that there is a perfect one. About the only thing to do is try one or more, and see what happens.

I have now visited the Puppy Linux site, and see that it is definitely not a full featured distro, but rather empahsizes compactness. KDE is somewhat at the opposite end of the philosophical spectrum. That does not bode well. The Puppy Linux site seems to indicate that there are already applications supplied that serve your intended purpose. Have you explored that avenue? If you are looking for an environment that can support feature laden applications, then I would humbly suggest a different distro.

--- rod.

dang, i was so happy when i found puppy, the prospect of giving up use of my comp for half the day to download a heavy distro that i might not even be able to set up correctly... ugh. plus puppy is so fast any of the more bloated distros will feel really slow, and windows goes snail pace so...

i suppose i'll make a new thread for this new issue...

so i'm on ubuntu now, and since it uses gnome, will installing the first class client (the program we've been talking about) be a problem since it's not KDE?

I can only speculate that ubuntu includes both gnome and KDE/Qt, and as such you should have no problem. If you have the 'locate' database set up, it is easy enough to find out:

Good luck with ubuntu. I think it will be better for the things you are attempting.

--- rod.

i have a problem with ubuntu though, when i try to download it will only download to the desktop. when i try to move it to the / with the graphical file manager, it says i don't have permission to write to that directory. how do i fix this?

also since ubuntu is debian based (is it? i'm not sure), should i download the .deb file instead and use dpkg? or should i just use the commands we talked about before?

So, you are downloading the First Class package? You don't need to move it to the filesystem root. You can 'cd' to /, then untar the package, or if you've downloaded a deb or rpm, simply install the package. The destination directories are built into the archive. Are you using a web browser to download the file? It should allow you to save the file anywhere in your home directory. In order to write to the / directory, you should need to be 'root'.

I'm not sure what native package manager ubuntu uses. If it is debian oriented, deb/dpkg is preferred over a generic tar package (always, AFAIK).

--- rod.

when i do: sudo dpkg --install fcc-8.101-1-Linux-i686.deb

or when i do: cd / and then the above, i get this:

dpkg: error processing fcc-8.101-1-Linux-i686.deb (--install):
cannot access archive: No such file or directory
Errors were encountered while processing:
fcc-8.101-1-Linux-i686.deb

the file is on the "desktop" which is separate from /
strangely, i can't cd into desktop, even though when i first open the terminal and ls, it shows up. i tried cd desktop, cd /desktop. but still nothing.

Try
The '~' is shorthand for 'my home directory'

--- rod

ah i found the problem! i was putting desktop instead of Desktop. d'oh. but i found out that the package manager in ubuntu checks for pacakages that are missing dependencies. and it got the libraries for me. so it's working!

thanks for bearing with me through all this Nbomr

Yippee! Glad to hear you finally got it working. Hope you managed to learn a few things along the way, too.

--- rod.