Dear Debian User Friends, Hi and greetings from Natal, Brazil.
I have an installation problem with Debian. My problem is urgent because I recently came to do research here at the physics department at the federal university here, and obtained permission to install Debian GNU/Linux on one of their PCs here on thursday. The expectations here are very high and this is the first machine here to have linux, so I am very anxious to make sure that Debian works properly by monday. This is a test case, since many people at the dept are interested in switching from win-95 to linux, but are inherently apprehensive about switching. If I don't fix this problem by monday, other professors here will all come to find out, and I will have to answer many questions.... Thus, if any of you have had problems similar to mine, or know how to fix it, I would be super grateful. Thanks. ^_^ PROBLEM: everything goes very smoothly (monitor and keybd configuration, partitioning the hard drive, activiating the swap and llinux partitions, installing the kerner and drv modules, configuring the dev drivers and the network) until I come to "install the base system" (from floppy). Here it says it reads all disks correctly but then gives an error while installing. Most often, the error is the following": "error in archive format" "there was a problem extracting from the drivers floppy /dev/fd0 " WHAT I HAVE DONE SO FAR TO TRY TO FIX THIS PROBLEM: I tried making new floppies. I made entirely new floppies, and I also downloaded the files via binary mode ftp to see if the browser downloaded it corrently. The files match perfectly, and make me think it is not really a floppy problem, although it could be. I tried 4 copies of the drivers disk, written like all others using rawrite2. The error is pretty consistent each time. Once, the error re-initialized the installation program before I could read the error. From the corner of my eye, I thought the error message said something like ""...sbin... could not create...config.sh ..." where the words need not be in the same order. Also, it was much too fast for me to see. But most often, the error msg was the one I mentioned above, i.e. "error in archive format, there was a prblem extracting from teh drivers floppy" I also went and made sure all BIOS settings like shadow ram and caches were all disabled. But this did not change anything. The same error recurrs. SOME IDEAS: I downloaded the files each time from a dir called /stable/disks-i386/current each time, from the Sao~ Paulo site at ftp://linux.if.usp.br/pub/mirror/Debian Could the problem be with the site by any chance? i.e. should I try a different mirror site, say, in the US , germany or Israel? Which is fastest?) Also, should I try to get the files from the directory other than "current"? I.e. is it a little older and hence more stable? What I will try meanwhile it to copy the bin and base-1_3.tgz files into the hard drive using a linux shell and mounting the floppy with mount -t msdos. Then, I will try the kernel and base installations from hard disk instead of floppy. I am not too optimistic about this though, since the problem does not seem to be the floppies. I will keep tryinjg different things until monday, and would greatly appreciate any advice/help you can afford me. I thank you very much for your kind consideration. :) Gandhi Viswanathan Dept of Physics UFRN Natal, Brazil -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] .