fresh potato install dpkg problem

[Aaron Solochek <aarons@andrew.cmu.edu>]

I just got to the point of first dselect on a fresh potato installation.
I get the following errors:

debconf: Perl may be unconfigured (It then lists files it can't find and
such)

E: Write error - write (32 Broken Pipe)
E: Failure running script dpkg-preconfigure --apt

Then it runs the standard "I'll try to configure the other packages" and
dies with code 100.

How can I fix this?

-Aaron Solochek