well.. was able to get the system installed, but there were a ton of errors in the process, and so far there have been 2 or 3 kernel oopses...
i finally gave up after the following error: fungus kernel: Kernel panic: kernel access of bad area pc c0031528 lr c0031650 address 20000034 tsk bunzip2/983 could this be a memory problem? this machine was cobbled together from the remains of other computers... so perhaps there was some bad ram in it.. any ideas / suggestions? thanks in advance, (going to bed in defeat...) dylan