Using 'sudo apt-get install build-essentials'

Drop the 's' off of the package name.

You want sudo apt-get install build-essential

You may also need to run sudo apt-get update to make sure that your package index is up to date.

For anyone wondering why this package may be needed as part of another install, it contains the essential tools for building most other packages from source (C/C++ compiler, libc, and make).

In my case, simply "dropping the s" was not the problem (although it is of course a step in the right direction to use the correct package name).

I had to first update the package manager indexes like this:

sudo apt-get update

Then after that the installation worked fine:

sudo apt-get install build-essential

Try

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install build-essential

(If I recall correctly the package name is without the extra s at the end).

I know this has been answered, but I had the same question and this is what I needed to do to resolve it. During installation, I had not added a network mirror, so I had to add information about where a repo was on the internet. To do this, I ran:

sudo vi /etc/apt/sources.list

and added the following lines:

deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian wheezy main
deb-src http://ftp.debian.org/debian wheezy main

If you need to do this, you may need to replace "wheezy" with the version of debian you're running. Afterwards, run:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install build-essential

Hopefully this will help someone who had the same problem that I did.

The package is called build-essential without the plural "s". So

sudo apt-get install build-essential

should do what you want.