I downloaded Eric's latest floppy images (2.1.8) today and reinstalled using them. They worked with no problems this time: dbootstrap didn't die once!
Unfortunately, I still can't boot from [EMAIL PROTECTED],0. Here's what I get on the screen, in case it helps: Rebooting with command: disk3 Boot device: /sbus/[EMAIL PROTECTED],800000/[EMAIL PROTECTED],0 File and args: Bad magic number in disk label Can't open disk label package Can't open boot device Type help for more information ok Some other points: Since gpm had the perfectly appropriate default "-t sun", should its default values also include "-m /dev/sunmouse" instead of "-m /dev/mouse"? I also found the responsiveness rather feeble: "-r 50" works better for me. I found that xserver-xsun worked, but only if I ran "startx" as root. I fixed that by changing the permissions of /dev/fb[0-7] from 622 to 666. This might be another bug in makedev which Eric has to compensate for when building boot-floppies ... xserver-xsun24 worked too, but xserver-xsun-mono didn't work on my hardware ... I had to run mkfontdir by hand. I'm not sure if the package installation scripts are supposed to take care of this. There are some annoying and, I think, incorrect dependencies on xbase, but I seem to recall that this is a known bug. Delete key doesn't work in an Xterm. I found that if I switched from VC 7 running X to VC 1 with Ctrl-Alt-1, then back again with Alt-7, the X server believed the Ctrl key still to be depressed. Most of the time, anyway. Not exactly a major bug, but my XFCom_SiS running on i386 doesn't get confused in this way. Another very minor one: The question "Do you want to make the ... X server the default? (y/n)", asked when you install an X server, is a bit messed up on the screen; there's a newline missing in /var/lib/dpkg/info/xserver-xsun*.postinst. It's probably a problem with my display, but I find the virtual consoles almost unreadable until I do echo -e '\033[1m'. Xterms are all right. All in all, I found this distribution to be a lot more mature than Debian's web pages suggest. Debian 2.1, running on four different architectures, is going to be a excellent system ... Edmund