Two friends and I spent four hours last Saturday installing the Debian packackage. (A beautiful spring day in Wichita Kansas.) When we couldn't get the installer to recognise my CD-ROM drive probably because it is plugged into my sound blaster card instead of the I/O port as the software probably expects. We plugged in my friends IDE CD reader and installed successfully. Except for a few modules which gave errors from the CD reader.
The next day I was playing with a operational Linux system which would boot from the hard drive. Since I'm a complete novice at Linux I didn't know even how to view a directory. I had seen the install done so I thought I'd re-install and this time write down the error messages and try and decide if they were serious. O O P S ! ! ! When I got into the "Install operating system kernel and modules" step I didn't know how to tell it to use the CD reader to input the drivers. I couldn't figure out how to back out of that procedure. So, I re booted. O O P S ! ! Now my hard drive boot sector is so trashed that if I try to boot from it the system locks up so tight that it requires power off to get it started again. So, I ran the "Make Linux bootable directly from hard drive." O O P S ! LILO wasn't able to install. But I can run Linux if I make a boot floppy. O O P S The "Make a bootable floppy" procedure trashes the header on the floppy disk so bad that it has to be re-formatted.
