malformed release file problem and workaround

[moveq.l@t-online.de (Christiane Rütten)]

Hi,

  maybe this topic has become old meanwhile, but I'd like to share my experiences
and thoughts on the "malformed release file" problem during woody-installation.

  We installed woody on several coputers now, and each time we stumbled into this
problem. Conversely, a friend of ours did not, though he used the same boot disks
and servers for the network installation. But there's one major difference to our
proceedings. While he used the english language settings for installation, we used
german language settings. Might this be a reason for the different behaviour?

  I finally discovered a simple workaround for this bug. We had a good reason for
not using the us.debian.org server, since it transfers very slow for us. You actually
can make use of the fact that the release file gets cached on disk:

- at first select the default us.debian.org server for downloading the release file
- as soon as it has been donloaded, you may safely interrupt by presing ^C
- after selecting the language settings you'll get straight to the installation
  of the base system where you may choose any server that works fast for you.

I hope this might help.

Regards,
Christiane Ruetten