Hi,

...

New user here. I've installed drupal7 (7.14-2) as a debian package on wheezy. Then, read lots of docs and tried to follow the tutorial here:

https://drupal.org/node/1924660

It says to install new modules, so I successfully installed

admin_menu-7.x-3.0-rc4.tar.gz imce-7.x-1.7.tar.gz

into modules/contrib (I had to create contrib). With the same procedure I installed

ckeditor_4.2.1_full.zip

but whereas the other two became visible to drupal and can be enabled, ckeditor never shows up.

The above tutorial says "not to use the drupal version", so I downloaded the one from ckeditor.com (the home page of ckeditor).

If I point the browser to

Yes that is correct. Welcome to the same trap I fell into. There is a Drupal ckeditor module that must be installed first, this is not ckeditor it'self.

First, please install Drupal 7.23, it's a bit cleaner and more secure. Download and install the drupal ckeditor module. Go to the ckeditor home page and find the ckeditor_n.n.n.tar.gz file and download to your /Downloads folder. In the /var/www/html/drupal folder or where ever you have it, Go to /sites/all/ and create a /libraries folder. Copy the Downloaded CKeditor zip or tar.gz file to the /libraries folder. Extract ckeditor so that you have a /ckeditor folder in the /libraries folder. This is the ckeditor that the Drupal ckeditor module looks for.

You will find that you need a few more modules and I strongly reccommend the module_filter module as it does a great job of listing and searching modules.

HTH Roger