For those of you interested in studying how the installation process can be improved to help newbies, I offer myself as a case study <weak grin>. Now I'm stuck and I need your help <I've fallen and I can't get up>.
On this,( my first ever installation of Linux) I installed stable Hamm using LSL's version of the official 2.0 release. Everything went swimmingly until I got to right before dselect/dpkg where it asks you to pick which installation type you want. I picked complete developer. Cool. Then some instructions to the effect that since I was using a preselected set I didn't need to individually dselect items to install. Unfortunately I didn't write those instructions down -- big mistake. I hit return. Oops. I looked for a "go back one screen type button and there was none. <For basic user interface being able to escape back to the previous screen is really important>. It automatically lauches dselect and I'm lost. I pick one of the choices off the main menu that sounds like it would complete the installation. It asked where I was going to install from. I picked CD-ROM off of a list and then it asked me something about which "block device" it was. Of course I had no idea. It said I could hit ^c to interrupt. I tried that. It didn't work. <I'd call that a serious flaw. I think it was because dselect was started from a script> Being cornered and not knowing what else to do I rebooted (my m$ dos background showing). Okay, I reboot off the floppy and it comes up okay and I login in and its okay, except all that cool stuff is not installed and the only file I can see in the root directory is something like "rev_[can't recall rest of name". I looked at that file in vi, and it looked like a configuration/installation type of file, but it has columns that give the program/package name and then it says "deinstall" after each one. Hmm.. go figure. Well, I'm wondering how do I get back into that automatic installation script that was working so well until I lost my way. I wanted to go back to where you select which type of installation you want and go from there. I couldn't figure out how to do that. I started dselect. I poked around, but I ended up back at that same screen where it asked for the block device name. I still didn't know the answer. At least this time the ^c let me out. Yeah! Well I really wanted to start over at this point. I just wanted to wipe the partition clean and start over. So I rebooted and tried to reinitialize my Linux root partition. That worked. I mounted it as root. Then I tried to reinstall the kernel and base OS. Instead of starting from a clean state I think there is still remnants on the partition because it tries to use a "recovery floppy image" from off of the CD-ROM, but it fails. It not only fails it takes ages to decide to fail <very user unfriendly in this respect>. So now I'm really stuck. I have no idea where to go from here. <The doesn't seem to provide any help at this point> Help! Ack! And oh, was the answer to the block device question /dev/hdc ? Thank you for patiently helping a newbie, Marcus