MJ Ray wrote:

First up, welcome to the group. Maybe we'll see you at Syleham on Sunday? I think the Debian talks are postponed until UEA, when we should be able to sink our claws into a Debian developer too.

Thanks for the welcome! I haven't yet learnt about Syleham, so, no, I wasn't there yesderday!

Well, it sounds like a hardware problem, or at least the boot kernel being incompatible with your hardware. The debian CDs should each have different kernels on and I think it might be worth your while trying the one with the "compact" or "idepci" kernels to see if that gets you any further.

Yes - I tried idepci, compact and safe. I could get the basic kernel system installed if I copied all the relevant files on to the DOS partition and installed from there. I could boot up, log in and run 'ls', etc., but obviously there wasn't anything much installed to do anything with. I ran dselect and chose what I wanted to install and it started reading from CD. It didn't get terribly far before it just locked up again with the CD and PC's HDD LEDs both permanently lit. Would I be right in thinking that the kernel must be fairly acceptable to my hardware as I could install from HD and then boot? Then again, the CD drive happily installs Slack 3.5 and Redhat 7.1, so it seems as though that works, too! I'm going round in circles, aren't I! It almost seems as though there's a fundamental problem with the actual machine code in the files on the Crazy Penguin disks or something like that.

Good suppliers include cheeplinux and Linux Emporium. Both offer a speedy service and decent discs.

Thanks for the tip. I've just looked at both these sites and they seem to have the sort of things I want. John Seago saw my message and has offered to lend me some CDs, so I'd like to try his first if possible, just to prove my hardware. All the best, Gerald.