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peterballard
May 1st, 2008, 02:05 PM
Hi all,

Sorry if this is a commonly asked problem, but I've googled without finding a satisfactory answer. I'm new to Ubuntu but not to Linux, though I've never found installing Linux to be easy.

My configuration should be pretty standard. On a brand new PC with Windows XP installed, I installed from a disk with the Ubuntu 8.04 release. I partitioned the hard disk, and installed Ubuntu, apparently cleanly, with a dual-boot XP/Ubuntu system. So the Ubuntu partition should be a stock standard Ubuntu 8.04 installation.

I don't have internet connectivity yet, but I thought I'd do the easy (?) thing first and install emacs. So I downloaded the latest release (emacs-22.2.tar), untarred it, and prepared to install.

The first step to installing emacs is to go into the emacs source directory and type "./configure". However ./configure didn't work, whether or not I sudo:

(Sorry, this code is typed out because I can't write to my USB stick either)



configure: error: C compiler cannot create executables
See `config.log' for more details.


When I look through config.log, the critical lines appears to be:



configure:3667: gcc conftest.c >&5
/usr/bin/ld: crt1.o: No such file: No such file or directory
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status


Some old posts I found suggested I needed to install g++, but that I can't install g++ (or anything else for that matter):



sudo apt-get install g++


Gives the reply:



E: couldn't find package g


I've also seen other posts suggesting installing various other things, but I haven't got install to work for anything. No matter what I've tried to install, it can't find it.

So I'm rather stumped. Suggestions? Thanks in advance.

sav2005
May 2nd, 2008, 03:23 AM
You are much better off installing emacs the Debian/Ubuntu way.

i.e. as root "apt-get install package" if you have internet access or if not, try to find a .deb file of the package on a CD and copy it to your machine


dpkg -i package.deb


If you have a Debian or Ubuntu applications CD you can add that to your repositories from the Synaptic desktop tool and hunt for some standard debs there.

Installing via the tar.gz > ./configue > make > make install > make clean route does not update your software database and often takes you round and round the dependency merry-go-round - I remember Mandrake and RedHat woes.