Installed Debian 'etch' on a IBM R40 laptop today and was trying to get a few packages installed. WOW...this linux thing is killin me. My first attempt was to try and install adobe flash player 9...that proved to be a joke. That was failure #1. I then attempted to install jre-6u1-linux-i586 and it gave me the indication that it installed as well...but the java test page shows that apparently I dont have it installed or installed correctly. I thought then I would perform a sudo apt-get remove jre-6u1-linux-i586 and it tells me that it cant find the package. From what I read on the net, if I was having problems with jre-6u1-linux-i586, maybe I should install jre 1.5. I didnt want to try and install this unless I can verify that I dont have jre-6u1-linux-i586 installed since the instructions I had was showing me how to create a symbolic link. Is there a way that I can try and locate jre-6u1-linux-i586 to see if its installed some place? Also tried using aptitude to locate the package but maybe I cant search by the original name for that package. Needless to say, this has not been one of my most productive days installing software. I admit I am a noob, but I didnt think the learning curve would be this steep. I was using this link (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.p...ox+real+player) in trying to install flash player and java but neither attempt proved to be successful, which brings me to my next question. How do you know when you need to create a symbolic link? I realize its a shortcut like in Windows, but I have not found a concise answer to describe when this is necessary. Is there a log that I need to look at that will tell me I am missing a link and what directory or what file do I associate this link with and how do I know that it needs to be this particular file? Can someone tell me when I need to create a link and what file I should be looking at when creating this link. From what I have found in the readme.txt files that comes with the packages, they dont give you a clue when to create a link or what file I should link to.

sorry for the ramblings, but I am beat down by playing with this OS and I am a advocate for linux...how sad is that? I would love to learn this OS as well as I knew Windows.

Why are you following Ubuntu howtos if you have Debian installed?

Why don't you use some paragraph breaks?

Debian is not often considered a good first distro for Linux newbies. If you know what you're doing, it works easily. Etch doesn't have Java 6, so stick with java 5 for the time being ... You definitely don't appear to be ready to move up to Lenny (Testing).

Make sure your sources.list contains "contrib" and "non-free"
and also ...
deb http://www.debian-multimedia.org etch main

# aptitude keep-all
# aptitude install debian-multimedia-keyring
# aptitude install flash-nonfree
# aptitude install sun-java5-jre
# aptitude install sun-java5-plugin

... and you're done.

If you can't manage that, you might be better of to start off with Ubuntu, or another more newbie friendly distro.