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.

"Edenyard" mail@edenyard.co.uk writes:

My problem is that I can get neither the new Slack or Debian to install. Booting from CD, they both get to a stage early on where the PC locks up solidly with the CD and HDD lights on permanently. I can swithc consoles (Alt-F2 etc.) and one of the consoles sometimes says 'hdc interrupt lost'. [...]

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.

I've not seen this error before, I'm afraid.

So my question really is: has anyone else ever had this problem and, if so, was it fixable? Or should I just stump up for a proper boxed set of Slack 7.1 from a reliable vendor? Who is a reliable vendor? Is Debian also available as a boxed set?

Debian is available as a boxed set, but the extra money goes as a donation to their holding company, rather than buying support, I believe. You could try a debian derivative such as Progeny (anyone tried this recently?)

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