Dear Debian Users, I've recently installed debian linux on my portable and have run into a problem with dpkg.
First, some background. I don't have access to an up and running linux machine, except for one with minimal disk space. I used that to make floppies for a base installation. Then I put my zip drive on a mac with an ethernet card and ftp-ed the most of the debian installation from my our mirror (most means Packages.gz and the directories admin, base, comm, devel, doc, editors, mail, math, misc, net, news, shells, sound, tex, text, and x11) I ftp-ed these to a dos formatted zip disks. Next, I reformatted my hard drive with three partitions: one for linux, one for linux swap and one a 200 Mb dos partition. Then, I booted DOS from a floppy that included drivers for my adaptec pcmcia scsi card, and I copied everything from the zip disks to the dos partition on the hard drive. After that, I rebooted with the linux boot floppy and went through the installation procedure. Up to this point all was great. I had a working base installation and I could boot linux from my hard drive. When running dselect, all seemed to be ok, but I couldn't seem to install anything, even when dselect told me it had installed things. So, I looked at the debian .deb files on the msdos partition. Because they were copied from a mac to a dos formatted disk, they all had names like `!acct_62.-0d'. To simplify dealing with them from bash, I wrote a script that removed the `!' from the filenames. Still, dselect didn't seem to be able to find them, so I started using dpkg by itself. This worked great, until I started trying to install xlib and emacs. Now dselect tells me that they are both half installed and need to be reconfigured. When I run dpkg to reinstall them, dpkg freezes my machine. Any ideas? Regards, Mike
