[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Thanks a tremendous lot for all the help. It really helps keeping my spirit > up as a newbie. > I managed to mount the dos partition allright, but it seems like dselect > wants an exact copy of the ftp-site, which is a problem since I can't make > the directory "binary-i386" with only 8 characters allowed in dos. > Seems like I'm gonna have to borrow a cd-drive off of somebody and try to do > the installation from there, alternatively (re)install the winbastard in the > dos-partition to be able to use longer names. Damn. > Anyone got any brilliant ideas for a (masochist?!) newbie?! > Regards > Vitux > > Error is human; complete disaster takes a computer...
You can download the base install to floppies (7 or 10 or so) and install the base. That will get you a minimal system that is capable of dialing into your ISP, at which time you can configure dselect to use ftp or the apt method. Then whenever you install a package you'll get the most recent stable release (or unstable if you so specify) by downloading at install time. On a slow dial-up link, it takes some time, but it sure is easy. Be aware that if you want to re-use the downloaded files, you may have to do some finagling, because I believe the apt method automatically deletes the deb files after they've been installed.
