Problem installing Debian 2.1 on Jensen

[ESP <evangelo@pigdog.org>]

Hi, folks.  I'm trying to get Debian to run on my Jensen (AXP 150)
machine, and I'm having a heap of trouble.

I've done the downgrade from firmware 1.8 to 1.7.  I did an ECU update
thingy, too, with the 1.7 disk, per the Digital documentation.  Then,
I switched over from the ARC thing to the SRM thing (someone might
want to write down how to do that, by the way -- it's mentioned
everywhere, but it's not particularly easy to figure out).

The device testing stuff seems to work fine -- no error messages or
anything scary.  But then I get the following stuff, which (I'm
guessing) appears to be from SRM:

         83 BOOT SYS
    INIT-S-CPU...

    ?40 NOSUCHDEV
         84 FAIL

Then, when I try to run "boot dva0 -flags i" I get this response:

	 84 FAIL

And back to the prompt.

I tried checking out my devices with "show dev", per the README, and
I think my floppy disk is at FD0, while my CD-ROM is at DKA400.  I
tried "boot fd0 -flags i", and got:

	84 FAIL

OK, now, here's where it gets INTERESTING.  Being resourceful, I then
tried this little trick: "boot dka400 -flags i".

Huzzah! I got an aboot prompt!  I typed in:

	aboot>/boot/jensen/linux root=/dev/scd0

(I left off all the ramdisk stuff, since I figure I don't need it.)
Then... dejection!  Here's what aboot has to say about it:

	aboot: loading plain /boot/jensen/linux...
	aboot: unexpected object file format 137631
	aboot: loading compressed /boot/jensen/linux...

	unzip: unknown compression method

And we go back to the aboot prompt.	

I'm pretty sure that it's at least finding the /boot/jensen/linux,
since I can seen the blinkenlights on the CD-ROM drive going, and if I 
try:

	aboot>/some/fake/path/fakefile gar=farquar

I get:

	/some/fake/path/fakefile: file not found

Which I cleverly deduced was a DIFFERENT error message.

So, I'm trying to make some sense out of all this.  I'd love to hear
any suggestions... I'm considering replacing my floppy drive, which
has problems writing under Windows NT, but reads just fine.  Any other 
suggestions?

~ESP