Marcus Johnson writes:
[snip]
> On this,( my first ever installation of Linux) I installed stable
> Hamm using LSL's version of the official 2.0 release. Everything went
> swimmingly until I got to right before dselect/dpkg where it asks you
> to pick which installation type you want. I picked complete
> developer. Cool. Then some instructions to the effect that since I
> was using a preselected set I didn't need to individually dselect
> items to install. Unfortunately I didn't write those instructions
> down -- big mistake. I hit return. Oops. I looked for a "go back
> one screen type button and there was none. <For basic user interface
> being able to escape back to the previous screen is really
> important>. It automatically lauches dselect and I'm lost. I pick
> one of the choices off the main menu that sounds like it would
> complete the installation. It asked where I was going to install
> from. I picked CD-ROM off of a list and then it asked me something
> about which "block device" it was. Of course I had no idea. It said
> I could hit ^c to interrupt. I tried that. It didn't work. <I'd
> call that a serious flaw. I think it was because dselect was started
> from a script> Being cornered and not knowing what else to do I
> rebooted (my m$ dos background showing).
Sounds like you need a basic Linux "howto". Block devices are hd<L#> for IDE
drives (where L is a letter and # is the partition on that drive) Primary IDE
master drive is hda, slave would be hdb. If a device is a CDROM drive, no
partition number is used. Serial devices would be ttyS<#>.
Let's assume that you have 1 IDE hard drive with 2 partitions and a CDROM
drive.
So in DOS terms, you get
C: = /dev/hda1 (since windows sits in the first partition)
D: = /dev/hda5 (/dev/hda2 is the extended DOS partition, and logical drives
start at hda5.)
E: = /dev/hdb (CDROM drives do not use partition tables)
COM1: = /dev/ttyS0
COM2: = /dev/ttyS1
COM3: = /dev/ttyS2
LPT1: = /dev/lp1
LPT2: = /dev/lp2
PS2 port = /dev/psaux
> Okay, I reboot off the floppy and it comes up okay and I login in and
> its okay, except all that cool stuff is not installed and the only
> file I can see in the root directory is something like "rev_[can't
> recall rest of name". I looked at that file in vi, and it looked
> like a configuration/installation type of file, but it has columns
> that give the program/package name and then it says "deinstall" after
> each one. Hmm.. go figure. Well, I'm wondering how do I get back
> into that automatic installation script that was working so well
> until I lost my way. I wanted to go back to where you select which
> type of installation you want and go from there. I couldn't figure
> out how to do that. I started dselect. I poked around, but I ended
> up back at that same screen where it asked for the block device name.
> I still didn't know the answer. At least this time the ^c let me
> out. Yeah!
>
> Well I really wanted to start over at this point. I just wanted to
> wipe the partition clean and start over. So I rebooted and tried to
> reinitialize my Linux root partition. That worked. I mounted it as
> root. Then I tried to reinstall the kernel and base OS. Instead of
> starting from a clean state I think there is still remnants on the
> partition because it tries to use a "recovery floppy image" from off
> of the CD-ROM, but it fails. It not only fails it takes ages to
> decide to fail <very user unfriendly in this respect>. So now I'm
> really stuck. I have no idea where to go from here. <The doesn't
> seem to provide any help at this point> Help! Ack!
>
> And oh, was the answer to the block device question /dev/hdc ?
>
> Thank you for patiently helping a newbie,
>
> Marcus
At this point, use MSDOS/WIn95 fdisk to delete the Linux partition. Then start
over with Linux. I'd recommend that you pick up a book on Linux. While it most
likely won't be Debian specific, it will have the basic information on how
Linux does things. Also, make sure that you have a swap partition. A swap
partition is like the virtual memory in Win95/3.1 only Linux allows up to 16
swaps and win95/3.1 only allow 1 swap.
--
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Thomas Kocourek KD4CIK
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