M J Ray wrote:

Right, you've only got the one CD enabled. Here's my working stable system's sources.list... see what it does for you:

This had me in awe of apt-get. Many thanks for that. gcc now installed, all those devel tools that were kind of stuck (it was a bit like a dose of syrup of figs actually). php then successfully unpackaged, as did rpm....it was great! Of course, being me, nthing works still, but I thought Adam was being a bit optimistic on IRC last night telling me it would. I need to read up more on apache now, thanks for the pointers all. Re. the comments on the use of php...I was planning on using it for small intranet type reports that, eg, suck info out of a database into an html file, then learn java for more fully blown web stuff. Each to their own! Thanks! Jenny.