Thanks to several people, in particular Andrew Sackville- West and Chris Lale, for their detailed advice with several previous installation problems.
I am installing Debian on an HP Pavillion machine that does not have a network connection. I was planning to use an "official" 15-CD set that has "Debian 3.1 Rel R4" printed on it. The installation program did not recognize my hard disk (I think it is a "Sata" device). However, I was able to create a "netinst" CD on another computer which allowed me to partition the hard disk and install a base system, but the absence of a network connection meant I had to go back to the CD set for further work. (1) I have been able to use "aptitude" to do some further installation but am not sure it is fully functional. The display at the top of the screen says "Actions Undo Package..." but alt-A, alt-U, etc on my keyboard don't do anything. (2) I understand the normal installation process includes an automatic installation of X that tries to automatically figure out configuration of my hardware. Within "aptitude," I have chosen "Tasks", "End-user", and "Gnome desktop environment", followed by typing "g". This seems to have installed packages, but I am still getting the character-based login prompt, and "xinit" and "startx" don't do anything. I'm really hoping I can get an idiot-proof process to do this work for me! (3) When I've tried to install gcc-3.3 or gcc, I get a message that libc6-dev is broken. (4) I confess to having a separate Windows XP partition (/dev/sda1). On previous Debian machines, I have used mtools to take files back and forth between the two systems. Is this still safe? Many thanks for past and future help! -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
