Andris Kalnozols wrote: > -SNIP- <
My initial description was rather vague. I have burned the first three CDs and the Debian installer dutifully asks if I would like to read them and index the available packages. It does this and puts the appropriate entries for the CDs into /etc/apt/sources.list. The defect seems to be with tasksel itself. After going through the menu and choosing a minimal server configuration, I get prompted to mount CD #1 and hit return. Doing so does nothing but loop at the same prompt. There was an instance during one of my many install cycles where tasksel recognized that CD #1 was mounted, but I was not able to duplicate the situation. Trying to load Debian onto another identical server gave the same results.
Weird! I have been doing a LOT of Woody installs recently on less-exotic machines, but with similar fundamental problems... the necessary drivers are NOT available on the "official" Debian CDs. I have found that installing the "base" system and NOT doing the tasksel or dselect steps will give me a minimal working system that I can use to boot-strap up the other stuff. You might see if that works for you to at least get something you can get a working network connection up & running. From there you can run tasksel again and get all the additional stuff. It really doesn't need to be part of the initial install...it is just there for convenience, IMHO.
I have done complete installs off the Internet with the help of a couple of boot-floppies, and more recently a patched "Potato" CD that has the drivers needed already installed as a starting point then "upgrading". That is where I found out that doing only the "base" install and then upgrading was WAY smoother than trying to do an upgrade on a "full" install! The situation here is trying to get a Debian Woody system running for a Blind friend located about 1200 miles away, and the kernel needs a special patch to divert the Console video to a speech synth. This has been a most interesting experiment!
Cheers & Good Luck! -Don Spoon-