[philja]

To Kevin : I had noticed over the past year that I practically always had to find a xxx-dev to go with package xxx that was already present. I now learn from your post the reason - separation of headers from guts.
To eschwartz : yes I looked at the evolutionary process. I also read another lengthy thread on this forum about linux / windows etc.

I don't mind a bit of tinkering with the innards but really my prime interest in a computer device is getting it to do some job I have in mind. So I prefer (and hope for) installations to be as painless and quick as possible.

I started out wanting to turn my recently written (paper) book into an ebook. I saw that sigil was a recommended tool so went to look at its website. I initially saw hostility towards linux and its distros and was disappointed although I could understand and appreciate the rationale of the writer.

So I installed and worked with Calibre on my UbuntuStudio desktop - easy installation directly from Calibre's website. Despite lots of stuff I saw written about the poor state of its html editor, I must say that I found it pretty good and the work I had to do, although lengthy, was pretty straightforward.

After completing the epub on Calibre, validating it on idpf.org and building a mobi with kindlegen, I thought this week that I would have a relook at Sigil.

The rest of the story is contained on this thread and the other thread with the pre-compiled deb package. In the first hour of Sigil 0.8.6 installed from the deb package, I had rebuilt my ncx file into something I preferred and had formed a distinctly favourable impression of the power of sigil as a production tool.

So I am happily impressed now with both Calibre and Sigil and I've learned a bit more about linux, along the way. Can't be bad.