dselect is killing me

[jh <thedoghouse@sunvalley.net>]

Hi. As anyone who has followed any of my posts knows, I'm totally green. At
this point I have debian installed. (from floppy) I now have access to my
cdrom. What I would like to do is install the x-window manager, as well as
some other things like joe. (some kind of text editor) I also want to
install the manual pages. Anyway, I go into dselect and mark the things I
want to install, I take care of the conflicts (that is I generally press
enter and let dselect figure it out) I go out of that screen and install
the packages that I marked. The message comes back:

Iso9660 extensions: Microsoft Joliet level 3
Unable to load NLS Charset iso8859-1(nls_iso8859_1)
Get currently installed package versions ?????????????????????????????
got 71 installed/pending packages
scanning available packages?cannot open
var/lib/dpkg/methods/multicd/available: no such file or directory

Does anyone know what this means? How can I get some things installed?

Thanks for your assistance,   

Jeff