Ok, This is a long tale to get to my question, so please bear with the background info.
I've been using Windows for a decade or so, but yearned for the opportunity to run a system that spends more time running applications than flashing blue screens and fatal exception errors. Linux sounded marvelous. At this writing, I'm about 20 hours experienced with Linux (Debian 2.0.34), which essentially means I know squat, so please excuse any newbie drivel. I downloaded Debian 2.0.34 from the debian mirror site a couple weeks ago. Pulled all the base files, the drivers file, etc. I ran rawrite2 to generate the installation disks, ran them, configured every driver that sounded useful (specifically serial, lp, ppp, slip, vfat, and umsdos) and shabam! I got Linux. First time! Played with it for a couple hours, and all was good. However... I have been trying, for the last 17 hours of my Linux experience to get a PPP connection running to my ISP. USR Courier external (not winmodem) on TTYS1 (com2). I've used pppconfig, pppsetup, PAP, CHAP, Chat, and the Lord's prayer all to no avail. It dials, and makes the connect sounds, but logs off 10 seconds after making the connection. I assume the ISP is waiting for, and not receiving login information, so is timing out. This is problematical as since I installed from floppy, I have no packages to speak of, and would very much like to run dselect to get some. This requires (of course) a connection. I could download everything from Windows and copy it over to Linux, but the principal of the thing prevents me from doing so. Tried reinstalling a couple times to see if I missed something. Nothing missed as far as the install utility is concerned. So I briefly gave up and decided to quickly learn about other basic Unix stuff like vi and cat and grep using the 'man' command. Debian can't find man. find / -name man comes up bare. Alright, fine. I have a book here that covers the basics. I had heard a few people talk about recompiling the kernel to add features however (though I'm not sure man counts as a feature persay), and since 2.0.35 is out, I figured what the hell. This time however, since I have Linux already installed (but maybe not a correctly built kernel), I can download the image in one big file, and follow the kernel-HOWTO right from within Linux. No floppies this time. It's all or nothing. Right? Sure. Downloaded the image (again from the Debian mirror), ran through all the pre-flight checks, didn't need to remove /usr/src/linux because it didn't exist. Checked symbolic links for asm, linux, and scsi, and went to flush the stale .o files using 'make mrproper'. Debian can't find make. find / -name make comes up bare. (sigh) What am I missing? Are make and man called something else in Debian? Did I forget to download some essential ingrediant on those first diskettes? Did I miss some procedure after the disk images are installed? Please help. Waif
