Hi Guys. OK I have sorted out all my GCC issues, help from you, and my own efforts too so thats all good. One prob to go !
I notice that I have lots of 'stuff' in my Linux partition, but it seeems I have to install anything I want to actually use ? For example,GCC seemed to work but I had to find where stdio.h was ( thanks for the tip to use dpkg -S stdio.h), and having found it, installed it, which worked - my C code tries to compile now.
NOW, I am tryig to find asoundlib.h and it seems this file is not on my machine, but I have found a few ALSA folders and in them 'modprobe-post-install.sh' ( which I ran to see what would happen; not a lot).
So, should I downloand and install an ALSA package from (god knows) or is it lurking somewhere in the depths of my install ?

One thing I would like say to any newbie like myself, IMHO.
This is day 3 for me of Linux. Linux, it seems, is very much a 'doing it' OS. Forget point/click/wizard/blue screen/reboot/crash, it aint like that. It seems that with Linux as you learn a tiny bit (as I have - very tiny), so it slowly gets better, but you really have to participate. To be honest, I am beginning to feel back in control of my PC again.

Hi mykaitch! Indeed, using Linux is a way to learn what is under the cover of an Operating System architecture, and in my opinion it is highly satisfactory to get a good result after a lot of hand work! Regarding your question, the header asoundlib.h is provided by the libasound2-dev debian package.

the header asoundlib.h is provided by the libasound2-dev debian package....

Which I have to download and install ?
(I have Debian Etch)

OK, I have fixed it. Now please explain why.

I decided to try apt-get install libasound2-dev

My PC popped off to Debian and did it, great.

How does it 'know' to go there? This is really interesting to me. Can I take a guess, that Linix fails to fing the pkg on my PC, and because I have a intet link it goes to the source from whixh I installed, and it does this because it was stored somewhere during the install ? Thats quite clever ( not of me, of it).

I am not used to Debian, but today almost each Linux distribution let you add the so-called Source Repository, that is - as you guessed - some place over the internet from which to download the package you need to install. This doc from the Debian site should clarify the entire process: Debian Repository HOWTO.

Maybe another useful tool is http://www.rpmseek.com/index.html, a site where you can find information about a lot of built RPM and DEB packages. The search engine let you also find the package that provides a specific file.