Debian

[richard at aoi.ultranet.com (Richard Royston)]

I bought Debian 2.0 from CheapBytes aome weeks ago to install on an old PC I 
have as soon as I upgraded it, but it took me much longer than I had 
anticipated to get my hardware together, and now the current Debian release is 
2.1. As I only have a modest speed dial-up connection to my ISP I don't want 
to try to download a whole new distribution (2.1), so I'd like to try to make 
my 2.0 installation work.

I had some fairly serious problems with the installation. My CD is a bit weird 
(Sony CD033), and may also be broken (its activity light stays on all the time 
the system is powered up), so I thought I'd go the floppy route (making the 
floppies on my other PC). The Rescue disk seems O.K. (as a disk), it matches 
the file on the Cheap Bytes CD and it boots. The Device disk seems O.K. too. 
But when I try to install from floppies I get into an endless installation 
loop when I get to the point when I'm supposed to load the OS kernel from the 
floppies. It goes like this: - main installation menu - Load OS kernel - 
select medium - select floppy - load Rescue disk (again) - load Driver disk - 
main installation menu (but this time it thinks, wrongly, OS is installed and 
presents configure network as the default) -  Load OS kernel - etc, ad 
infinitum .....

Is there an ASCII installation script somewhere in the RAMDISK filesystem that 
I could look at and edit to stop it getting into this stupid loop? Or have I 
missed some simple mistake I'm making without realizing it? Or is there 
something else of a modest size that I can download? I'm loth to download 
stuff for 2.1 because the release notes on the home page say XFree86 is all 
different for it, and I'm not confident enough of my knowledge of XFree86 to 
do the necessary mixing and matching with what's on my 2.0 CD's.

I seem to remeber Gerry remarking at the Installfest that Debian 2.0 wasn't 
really 2.0, or something like that, but I didn't follow up. Silly me!
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Richard J. Royston                             68 Baldwin Street
richard at aoi.ultranet.com                       Apartment 22
(617) 242-5280                                 Charlestown, MA 02129
r.j.royston at rcn.com

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