(sorry about the mime, if any.. i'm using hotmail)(sorry about the bad wording too...)
I have a compaq presario 1220 POS laptop (200mhz cyrix mediagx w/80mb ram/2gb hard drive). I am trying to install debian on it with boot-floppies 3.0.19 and i have had several errors. The first time i tried it, i managed to do a net install over my school's LAN with dhcp and it downloaded the base packages with no problems... I took it home and went to step 2, and this is where the problem starts.. First of all, it froze when syncing hardware clock and sysclock, but that is the laptop's fault... On tty1, it says configuring base system, and it just sits there. After about 30 mins, i went over to tty2, and did ps -ax, and i noticed it was trying to display it on pts/0... i killed some random processes, and i was just gonna do dselect and whatnot manually, but it won't let me get rid of all of base-config's child processes... I did a second try (this time, with a bootable cd made from rescue.bin with drivers.tgz on it) and now it won't let me manually set the network settings... after the network configuration, it says "The network was not initialized properly... it will work when you reboot, if you configured it correctly"... So i switched over to tty2, used ifconfig and route to configure my ethernet interfaces... it let me go to the next step, but then it said it downloaded a malformed release file... i have tried using basedebs.tar (although i had to mess around and manually gzip it to make the installer recognize it) and it still gives me the same problem after reboot... are there any bugreports on this, or does anybody know what i'm doing wrong? Also, i noticed that the woody installer no longer asks about sid. How the heck am i supposed to install sid without dist-upgrading from woody?