Why can't you copy the picutre into your web file?
Any what host are you using for the web server? It sounds like you're trying to link an address from your PC that the server isn't recognizing. If the server isn't running from your Windows PC (assuming based on the c:/ file path you're on Windows) then it won't recognize the file path.
For example, I'm running Tomcat from my current (work) PC, saving a picture into C:\apache-tomcat-xxx\webapps\examples and then editing the index.html file there to include the picture with the relative path should work:
HTML:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<HTML><HEAD><TITLE>Apache Tomcat Examples</TITLE>
<META http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html">
</HEAD>
<BODY>
<P>
<H3>Apache Tomcat Examples</H3>
<P></P>
<ul>
<li><a href="servlets">Servlets examples</a></li>
<li><a href="jsp">JSP Examples</a></li>
<li><a href="websocket">WebSocket Examples</a></li>
</ul>
<img src="mypic.jpg" /> <------- *PICTURE TAG*
</BODY></HTML>
Save the picture in the same folder as your index.html file and
USE RELATIVE PATHS whenever possible as it makes moving apps between hosts a LOT easier.
Once you have it working from the same folder you can add a folder in the directory for pics or whatever and reference it as 'src="pics/mypic.jpg"'
-Edit: You also don't need the 'file:' prefix and don't lead the URL with a slash. Assuming everything else is correct, your original tag should be:
HTML:
<img src="c:/Users/omegaman/desktop/****.jpg" />
Again though, you're saying you're on Debian, but are referencing a Windows directory so there is some kind of discrepancy there, but you know your setup better than us.