Re: Installation Help

[Jonathan Jefferies <jonathanj@allant.com>]

Hi all,

Got some dumb installation questions.

Situation:
1.  Installing onto a virgin drive (hda2 & hda3) in a system
    which already has Linux (Redhat) and Win95 installed
2.  Installing from a scsi cdrom which linux recognizes.
3.  Boot from install floppy, id of scsi and installation of 
    basic system are accomplished.
4.  As I already have lilo installed and have built a 
    backup boot floppy I've skipped the reboot section
    and gone into configuring the system, network, etc
    that are possible from the initial installation.

Now I have the basic Debian system loaded, but haven't
been able to get further in installing the whole system.
And have not gotten into the dselect mode -well ok I did
get that far on my first pass but not since then.

Minor problems/quirks, 

1.the boot floppy boots properly but
  dumps me at a prompt i.e. doesn't give me a login, I can
  "ALT F0-F6" and get a boot prompt but don't seem to be able
  to exit the open prompt.
2.On one attempt at installing the system I rebooted and after
  logging in got "passwd" demanding that I fill in  a passwd
  for root.  It wouldn't accept my passwd and wouldn't die
  no matter how many times I killed it from another window.
  Really left me cussing the fool who designed this setup.
  Finally went in by hand and set the passwd in /etc/passwd
  which leads to my next question are the passwords shadowed
  in Debian??

Main Questions:
  1.  How to restart the installation process and get the
  rest of the packages installed?
  2.  Would blowing away the whole installation up to this
  point and starting from scratch make more sense?
  3.  Has anyone else installed DebIan from the cdrom set
  from "Cheaper Bytes"?

Thanks
Jonathan Jefferies
<jonathanj@allant.com>