Thanks for the replies; when giving detailed info to Oliver Elphick, (who I thank very much for his help), I realized that my FTP-method dselect was looking to the stable distribution instead of the hamm distribution; so of course everything "broke". Being a newbie, I just took all the defaults that dselect offered me. Once I realized the error, I changed the path and the installation went fairly smooth. Had a couple of glitches, one of which told me to file a bug report (which I'll try to figure out how to do here in a few minutes). But over all, my system seems to work. The less command works; the man command works; I can even telnet into the box from another computer! Whoo-hoo!
BTW, I didn't go the CD route because I'm doing this on an old-486 that doesn't have a cd drive. Which is probably a good thing, because I have a slackware CD, and if I had had a cd drive, I would have gone with slackware instead of debian. Now, a couple of weeks after the decision to go with debian, I think I've made the better choice. Also BTW, the documentation I've found on the web is decent, but it's really not that great for newbies who know nothing about unix/linux/debian. It's taken me several weeks to get to the knowledge level I'm at, which is a very low knowledge level. It was pretty discouraging, and until more hand-holding takes place in the documentation, there will be fewer newcomers to the wonderful world of linux than would otherwise be. My two cents.... Again, thanks! >> Second: I recently did a clean install of Debian 2.0.34 (not an upgrade), >> mistakenly believing this to be the current stable release. I've since >> become convinced that Deb2.x ("hamm") is still the unstable version. >> Nevertheless, I'd like to stick with it, since the comments I've read on >> the web seem to indicate that it's got some nice features. >> >It does, and almost all of the release-critical bugs have gone. Suffice >to >say it's going to have far less bugs in critical stuff than a Microsoft >release. > >> I've reinstalled several times, and everytime I run dselect something >> breaks and I wind up getting frustrated and wiping the drive and starting >> over. Recently I found some clues to my problem; apparently Deb2 uses a >> library version 6, whereas Deb < 2 uses a library version 5, and the two >> don't get along. >> >> I've found some instructions (which are really above my head) for upgrading >> from <2 to 2, but I'm not doing an upgrade; I'm doing a clean (new) >> install. Do I still need to follow these instructions for upgrading >> (running autoup.sh, etc), or does my clean install already have all the >> upgrade stuff in place? >> >Your clean install will already have all the "upgrade stuff" in place. > >> If my box has all the upgrade stuff in place, did the base install not >> install the man program? (man doesn't work on my box.) > ><snip> > >> Third: Why doesn't the less command work? It reports "bash: less: command >> not found". > > >The base install does NOT include the man program. It is a package >(though >it's of "important" priority, so virtually all machines have it >installed). >Similarly, less is also a package.Therefore, until you successfully >perform >a package installation man and less are not going to work. > >I haven't tried using dselect with FTP, so I can't say why you are >having >such trouble with it. You are running dselect as user 'root', I >presume? > >Other than that, I suggest you post some more details of the problems >you have been having with dselect to the debian-user mailing list. > >Finally, it may be easier for a newbie like yourself to get a CD and do >the install from it. Check the Debian website for information on CD >vendors >- don't bother with 1.3, go straight to the 2.0 beta. =========================================================== Kent West | Technology Support/Customer Service | Abilene Christian University | Voice: 915-674-2557 FAX: 915.674.6724 | ACU Station, Box 29005 | E-MAIL: [EMAIL PROTECTED] | Abilene, TX 79699-9005 | Ham: KC5ENO, General | =========================================================== -- Unsubscribe? mail -s unsubscribe [EMAIL PROTECTED] < /dev/null