On Mon 04 Apr 2016 at 16:51:23 -0400, Alan McConnell wrote: > <G> solved now, I hope! Now my progress report: after futzing around > and > trying to install this and that, I decided to bite the bullet/go with > the > flow, and install GNOME, the whole thing. Which I did, and it took > just > short of an hour. For some reason, Libreoffice was not installed. I > hope > I can get it later, since I know no other method of reading the > occasional > .doc and .docx files that come my way.
Strange. Libreoffice packages are dependencies of gnome (as is gdm3). You could try apt-get install -f or apt-get install libreoffice > [ By the way: I could and did get emacsen-common, but still have no > working > emacs. How does one get such? ] emacs24 is on DVD-2, so either you obtain this disk or (as was suggested earlier in this thread) set up sources.list for an external mirror and get it over the network. > Result of my GNOME install: I typed 'startx' from my command > line, and I > got a beautiful blue screen, a delight to the eye after days of > perusing tiny > characters on a black display. And in the middle of the blue screen > there was > a handsome mouse arrow, which moved around elegantly when controlled > by my right > hand. Progress indeed. > And that was _all_!! No icons, nothing to click on . . . I typed on > the keyboard, > no reaction . . . There must be some simple way to get a proper > GNOME started, > but since I've never used it before, I wonder if someone can give me > a hint. The gnome I have has 'Activities' in the top left of the screen.
