hello!

i'm new to linux and have recently installed ubuntu on an old machine at my house.

after some doing, i was able to get emacs installed. however, when i tried to compile my own HELLO_WORLD, gcc couldn't locate the libraries (at least, it couldn't locate STDIO.H).

i thought that LIBC6 and LIBC6.1 were the standard C libraries (both of these were dependencies for emacs and i've installed both). am i mistaken thinking that, and is there some other package that i need? or is it the case that i already have what i need, and only need to direct gcc to it?

thank you!

In Ubuntu (and many other distributions) the runtime and development versions of libraries are split into separate packages. Since most users only need the runtime libraries, these are the only ones installed by default. The compiler, linker and other development tools are also not installed by default.

To install them, you need to add the package "build-essential", which will automatically install the C compiler, some other tools and the libc development library. For C++ development you need the package g++.

Many non-trivial projects will use some build system like GNU Autoconf/Automake, CMake, Ant, and so on. Each of these have their own package which must also be installed if youo with to use them.

Since you are new to Ubuntu, I would recommend installing them using the Synaptic package manager. You don't need to download any files yourself - just open synaptic, search the the packages by name and select them for installation and apply the changes. It worries me slightly that you said it took a lot of effort to install emacs, as it should be a trivial operation - just add the "emacs" package in synaptic.

If you're not used to emacs, it might not be for you. It is a very capable editor, but it is a bit weird if you are used to Windows tools, which have a rather different style to them. I would recommend trying out different editors. Emacs and vi are popular with coders as they both have very powerful features, but both have quite a steep learning curve - especially vi, which to start with can be very frustrating.

well, installing emacs was only a pain b/c i don't have a network connection on that machine.

i'm pretty familiar with the editor itself, i've been using it for over a year on the CS cluster at the university i attend (i'm working on a CS degree). when i work on my projects from home, i use putty to ssh into the cluster and do my projects from there.

the only thing that worries me about this setup is that when my network connection goes down, i can't accomplish anything unless i go to campus and work on the linux machines there.

sooooo...i need to have all the capabilities at home that i would in the computer science lab on campus, or i could potentially end up in a tough spot right before a deadline (that actually happened to me a couple of weeks ago, which is what motivated me to start switching over to linux at home).

am i basically looking for a .deb file called "build-essential"? and are you also saying that i might be missing my linker, as well?

thank you so much for your help!

If you have network access on this machine you want to install the software to, you don't have to download anything manually - synaptic will do it all for you.

i DO NOT have a network connection on the machine in question.