On Sun, May 11, 2014 at 10:03 AM, Joshua Anthony <[email protected]> wrote: > > Hi all, > > Thanks for your responses - even from those who can't resist the opportunity > for rudeness.
Unfortunately, we are not always in good moods, I guess. > > (I do NOT use microsoft windows in any form,) > > I confess to much ignorance of technical detail - despite 45 years as a > computer support > engineer, programmer and technical writer, I still find a lot of stuff hard > to grasp. ie. I am > old and lazy and think GUI is a gift from heaven. So would you, if you'd > started out punching > ten words of machine code onto paper tape in order to start up a mainframe > system - long > before there was any form of visual display. Hey can we start one of those those threads? I think the teletype/paper tape terminal we used in high school to interface with the IMSAI box we built. (Much gratitude to a teacher who used a lot of his own money to make that possible for us.) So you've got me beat by about ten years. But, yeah, Univac 1100 with punched card readers and less main memory than my M6800 prototyping board, my first year in the community college's EDP courses. IBM System 34 at my summer job. > Like Joel, I have many dark corners of stupid in my brain - and they may be > multiplying. The more you know, the more you know you don't know, hey? > I have used GNU Linux for years - trying out several distros, all by > downloading the Iso file > and writing to CD. Ubuntu, Slackware, Puppy, and Gnewsense all install just > fine after > simply right-clicking on the file and selecting write to CD. What OS/hardware/application combination do you use to write the CDs? The first installs I did were with CDs from Japanese magazines on old Macintosh hardware -- OpenBSD and NetBSD and MkLinux (maybe?) on 68k boxes. The first CDs I burned were using what, at the time, seemed to be system functions on a FreeBSD/x86 box that I had originally installed from a CD from a Japanese magazine. I also got used to treating the CD as just another part of the file system, back in the days of Mac OS X 10.0-10.2. The first time a Fedora System started treating music files as something different from regular files, I was a bit taken aback. > No clever stuff with the terminal - just point and click. But this time it > just doesn't work. Since we don't know what software/hardware you're using, I'm afraid this doesn't tell us much. On Debian, we have to use burner software of some sort -- for GUI, Brasero and XFBurn are pretty common. And we have to be careful to tell the software to burn the image, rather than build a file system on the CD and store the image as a file there. > For those who didn't notice, I downloaded the file twice, making two CD's > from the first > download and one from the second - just in case anything was corrupted. All > the CD's > can be opened and their contents displayed - and all files in readable form > can be read. Well, you know, without more information, I couldn't be sure that you don't have one of those archive managers that integrates with the file system explorer. Some of those integrated archive managers will auto-magically mount an ISO for you, so that it's almost just like mousing around the regular file system. And I also couldn't be sure that the burn process made it successfully through the entire track on the CD. I have experienced, with Fedora, I think, incomplete burns before. Don't remember whether I ever figured out why. Might have been the screen-saver kicking in before the burn completed. Debian installers have an option to check the install media and the files instead of starting the actual install. > I would happily stay with Gnewsense but since I recently installed the latest > version, I can't > get a couple of much used applications that worked perfectly with the > previous version to run. > So I thought I'd try Debian instead, using exactly the same process, on the > same machine, > that I used to successfully install Gnewsense. Gnewsense is one of the distros I haven't tried yet. > This is not rocket science. It's not an abstruse technical problem - it must > be plain old > dumbass misunderstanding by me. > > Doesn't anyone have a simple answer? > > Josh Well, can you check what you are using to burn the CDs? and can you try to catch the install at the step where it allows you to select options, and run the media test? (And, maybe, while you're at it, memory test? Although, about every two years, when it's time to clean and re-seat the RAMs and I/O boards, the RAM test doesn't always tell me more than I know from the random freezes that clear up after I clean things.) -- Joel Rees Be careful where you see conspiracy. Look first in your own heart. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected] Archive: https://lists.debian.org/CAAr43iPQTsq=SSi8O87zW1UVab7Oacysn3RHN1gMfw=dcy_...@mail.gmail.com
