Newbie attempting to install Debian

["Rick" <roderic@surfbest.net>]

Hello,

I recently got excited about the possibility of switching to Linux, and
never having to use Microsoft Windows again. While I am a programmer, and
used Unix many years ago, I am a complete newbie to Linux. I've chosen to
try to install Debian because I respect open source code and because of the
good things I've heard about its package management system. I decided to try
installing Woody, because I've heard it's stable and nearing release.

I'm trying to install it to an older laptop machine (Pentium mmx, 128 Meg
Ram, 4G hard drive). While I have a CD-R burner in a desktop machine, the
laptop's CD-reader is too finicky to read them, so I searched for another
way to do the installation. I decided to install from a Dos partition. The
laptop has a second hard drive, and I was able to copy the contents of the
first Woody CD to a Dos partition on the hard drive.

The beginning of the installation went fine. I created my swap and boot
partitions, and selected a file image for the kernel (selecting everything
from the directory woody/main/disks-~1/current). Trouble came at the step
"Install base system." When it searched for a file it could use for the
base, it gave the error "Couldn?t find any directory containing a file
basedebs.tar or dists\woody\main\binary-i386\Release" I couldn't get beyond
this point.

I searched through the Dos partition I was installing from. It contained a
file "dists\woody\main\binary-i386\Release". Is it possible this "file" is
actually a soft link to a directory? Of course the DOS file system doesn't
support soft links, so I could see why that would be a problem. If this is
the case, is there a way I can fix things to continue to install from a DOS
partition?

Thanks in advance for your help,

Rick T


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