Starting Over
For those of you interested in studying how the installation process
can be improved to help newbies, I offer myself as a case study <weak
grin>. Now I'm stuck and I need your help <I've fallen and I can't
get up>.
On this,( my first ever installation of Linux) I installed stable
Hamm using LSL's version of the official 2.0 release. Everything went
swimmingly until I got to right before dselect/dpkg where it asks you
to pick which installation type you want. I picked complete
developer. Cool. Then some instructions to the effect that since I
was using a preselected set I didn't need to individually dselect
items to install. Unfortunately I didn't write those instructions
down -- big mistake. I hit return. Oops. I looked for a "go back
one screen type button and there was none. <For basic user interface
being able to escape back to the previous screen is really
important>. It automatically lauches dselect and I'm lost. I pick
one of the choices off the main menu that sounds like it would
complete the installation. It asked where I was going to install
from. I picked CD-ROM off of a list and then it asked me something
about which "block device" it was. Of course I had no idea. It said
I could hit ^c to interrupt. I tried that. It didn't work. <I'd
call that a serious flaw. I think it was because dselect was started
from a script> Being cornered and not knowing what else to do I
rebooted (my m$ dos background showing).
Okay, I reboot off the floppy and it comes up okay and I login in and
its okay, except all that cool stuff is not installed and the only
file I can see in the root directory is something like "rev_[can't
recall rest of name". I looked at that file in vi, and it looked
like a configuration/installation type of file, but it has columns
that give the program/package name and then it says "deinstall" after
each one. Hmm.. go figure. Well, I'm wondering how do I get back
into that automatic installation script that was working so well
until I lost my way. I wanted to go back to where you select which
type of installation you want and go from there. I couldn't figure
out how to do that. I started dselect. I poked around, but I ended
up back at that same screen where it asked for the block device name.
I still didn't know the answer. At least this time the ^c let me
out. Yeah!
Well I really wanted to start over at this point. I just wanted to
wipe the partition clean and start over. So I rebooted and tried to
reinitialize my Linux root partition. That worked. I mounted it as
root. Then I tried to reinstall the kernel and base OS. Instead of
starting from a clean state I think there is still remnants on the
partition because it tries to use a "recovery floppy image" from off
of the CD-ROM, but it fails. It not only fails it takes ages to
decide to fail <very user unfriendly in this respect>. So now I'm
really stuck. I have no idea where to go from here. <The doesn't
seem to provide any help at this point> Help! Ack!
And oh, was the answer to the block device question /dev/hdc ?
Thank you for patiently helping a newbie,
Marcus
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