Re: Confusion

[Joel Rees <joel.rees@gmail.com>]

On Sun, May 11, 2014 at 10:03 AM, Joshua Anthony <janfany@yahoo.com.au> wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> Thanks for your responses - even from those who can't resist the opportunity for rudeness.

Unfortunately, we are not always in good moods, I guess.

>
> (I do NOT use microsoft windows in any form,)
>
> I confess to much ignorance of technical detail - despite 45 years as a computer support
> engineer, programmer and technical writer, I still find a lot of stuff hard to grasp. ie. I am
> old and lazy and think GUI is a gift from heaven. So would you, if you'd started out punching
> ten words of machine code onto paper tape in order to start up a mainframe system - long
> before there was any form of visual display.

Hey can we start one of those those threads? I think the
teletype/paper tape terminal we used in high school to interface with
the IMSAI box we built. (Much gratitude to a teacher who used a lot of
his own money to make that possible for us.) So you've got me beat by
about ten years. But, yeah, Univac 1100 with punched card readers and
less main memory than my M6800 prototyping board, my first year in the
community college's EDP courses. IBM System 34 at my summer job.

> Like Joel, I have many dark corners of stupid in my brain - and they may be multiplying.

The more you know, the more you know you don't know, hey?

> I have used GNU Linux for years - trying out several distros, all by downloading the Iso file
> and writing to CD. Ubuntu, Slackware, Puppy, and Gnewsense all install just fine after
> simply right-clicking on the file and selecting write to CD.

What OS/hardware/application combination do you use to write the CDs?

The first installs I did were with CDs from Japanese magazines on old
Macintosh hardware -- OpenBSD and NetBSD and MkLinux (maybe?) on 68k
boxes. The first CDs I burned were using what, at the time, seemed to
be system functions on a FreeBSD/x86 box that I had originally
installed from a CD from a Japanese magazine. I also got used to
treating the CD as just another part of the file system, back in the
days of Mac OS X 10.0-10.2. The first time a Fedora System started
treating music files as something different from regular files, I was
a bit taken aback.

> No clever stuff with the terminal - just point and click. But this time it just doesn't work.

Since we don't know what software/hardware you're using, I'm afraid
this doesn't tell us much. On Debian, we have to use burner software
of some sort -- for GUI, Brasero and XFBurn are pretty common. And we
have to be careful to tell the software to burn the image, rather than
build a file system on the CD and store the image as a file there.

> For those who didn't notice, I downloaded the file twice, making two CD's from the first
> download and one from the second - just in case anything was corrupted. All the CD's
> can be opened and their contents displayed - and all files in readable form can be read.

Well, you know, without more information, I couldn't be sure that you
don't have one of those archive managers that integrates with the file
system explorer. Some of those integrated archive managers will
auto-magically mount an ISO for you, so that it's almost just like
mousing around the regular file system.

And I also couldn't be sure that the burn process made it successfully
through the entire track on the CD. I have experienced, with Fedora, I
think, incomplete burns before. Don't remember whether I ever figured
out why. Might have been the screen-saver kicking in before the burn
completed.

Debian installers have an option to check the install media and the
files instead of starting the actual install.

> I would happily stay with Gnewsense but since I recently installed the latest version, I can't
> get a couple of much used applications that worked perfectly with the previous version to run.
> So I thought I'd try Debian instead, using exactly the same process, on the same machine,
> that I used to successfully install Gnewsense.

Gnewsense is one of the distros I haven't tried yet.

> This is not rocket science. It's not an abstruse technical problem - it must be plain old
> dumbass misunderstanding by me.
>
> Doesn't anyone have a simple answer?
>
> Josh

Well, can you check what you are using to burn the CDs? and can you
try to catch the install at the step where it allows you to select
options, and run the media test? (And, maybe, while you're at it,
memory test? Although, about every two years, when it's time to clean
and re-seat the RAMs and I/O boards, the RAM test doesn't always tell
me more than I know from the random freezes that clear up after I
clean things.)

-- 
Joel Rees

Be careful where you see conspiracy.
Look first in your own heart.