Dselect doesn't seem to work

["James L. Hurlburt" <jlh@ewa.net>]

Sirs:

I read about slink on the news sites and decided to give it a try.
I have an new hard drive on my machine for Debian, so it has it's own 4.3G
hard drive to play with.  At the moment, I am booting from a floppy -- when
I get the system going to suit me, I will probably go to a dual boot with
loadlin from the win95 boot drive.  I made it work just fine with a red hat
version, so I don't anticipate any serious problems with debian.

My problem.

Somewhat at random, I choose a cd set with cheapbytes.com as the
distributor.  If this is the problem, well, it was only $7 for the set.  If
you can suggest a better vendor I will try that.

I installed debian ok, I have a 120 mb swap partition, a 500 mb root
partition, and the rest as /usr (~3.9 GB)  Things went fine until it came
time to run dselect.  I had previously chosen the mongo developer profile at
the end of install.

I put in the #2 binary cd, and attempted to follow instructions.
When I run update, I get error messages saying "Can't find
_non_free_package.cd, _non_US_, and _local_ Package.cd.  I tell it to scan
for each and get an error message "Can't find
/great_long_path/non_free/binary_i386  Error status 1"

When I run install, I get the error message "Can't open
var/lib/dpkg/methods/multicd/available Error status 1.

Then it doesn't install the software.

So far, I have no clue about what I should do.  It seems that dselect's
config assumptions and the cd's directory structure and files must not
match.

Do you have any suggestions about what now?  The directories on the cd don't
seem to match the expected directories in the How-To files very closely, and
I don't see how to make dselect happy.

Thanks,
Jim Hurlburt
jlh@ewa.net

******************************
It's bad luck to be superstitious!!