Jenny_Hopkins@toby-churchill.com writes:

reply - package php4-pgsql has no installation candidate

Please post any uncommented bits of your sources.list file. It sounds like something's not quite set up to let you get this installed.

...

apt-get install task-debian-devel task-devel-common task-c-dev

reply - 8 million dependencies that aren't going to be installed.

Care to post the exact list? It sounds like you might not have any development tools installed, so you've no choice but to get them if you want to build your own software.

Not sure where i go wrong, but every time I try installing anything this happens, and I finally give up in a temper.

The truth is out there... http://www.uk.debian.org/ -> documentation

I can see a bcc package on the debain site, no cc.

You need gcc. Installing task-c-dev should get you everything you need in that line.

reply - firstly, it was mentioned in a casual kind of a manner on irc that in order to build web pages one had to learn php (i thought it was by you, actually!).

No, to build web pages, you need (x)html. Nothing more.

secondly, it has now been recommended by my bro' as a neat simple solution to manipualting info in a web page.

It's actually a fairly poor solution for anything other than toy manipulations.

Thirdly, i don't speak c and can't write shell scripts,

PHP is rather too c-like for me. Then again, I like my scripts to look like single function calls at the top level ;-)

and were I to learn i'd probably have an even worse job trying to compile the c compiler!

Why would you want to compile it? Just install it.