failure in installation

[Ariel Tankus <arielt@post.tau.ac.il>]

    I tried to perform an installation of woody using
boot-floppies-3.0.18 .  I wanted to install via the network.
However the following error prevented me from installing
woody:
    When attempting to install the base system, the following
error message occured:  ``Malformed Release file'', prefixed
by the ftp site I was pointing to.  Anyway, the error message
appeared time and again.  It appeared immediately after I pressed
Enter at the previous screen, i.e., it did not actually attempt
to bring the Release file.  Moreover, when I (deliberately) disconnected
the network cable, exactly the same message appeared.
    I saw in a mailing list (don't remember which, sorry), that
if one had network definitions problem, then there is no way out
of this bug, but to re-install from the very beginning, including
formatting the partitions.  I did so, and this time I had no single
problem until the base system installation, but once again I received
the above error message.  Once again, it appeared instantly, so it
seems to me it did not even attempt to access the network.
    I know the network configuration was just fine (except from the
initial problem I had, when my machine was not defined at the school
DHCP server), because I could manually ping other computers, including
their names (i.e., DNS resolved them fine), and I could even use
wget to manually bring the Release file by ftp.
    My network adaptor is eepro100 (EtherExpressPro 100).  The computer
is Pentium II 400MHz, 40G HD, 128M RAM.
    I know the problem occured at 3.0.17, and I send this e-mail to confirm
it still exists in 3.0.18.  It is an annoying bug, as I cannot continue the
installation of woody.


	-- Ariel.

---
Ariel Tankus
School of Computer Science
Tel-Aviv University
arielt@post.tau.ac.il