This is posted with the hope it'll maybe help, or at least entertain somebody. Feel free to point at me and laugh.

I cleared up some space on my Athlon 2600+ box with the intention of installing Debian Sid. I downloaded and burned 3 CDs (using jigdo). However, when I attempted to install, the installer got through the language and keyboard questions and dumped me to an ash shell.

So I went back and downloaded 3 Debian Sarge CDs. Same result.

Turns out you're supposed to either:

1) install Debian Woody, change every instance of "stable" in /etc/apt/sources.list to "testing" or "unstable" (depending on what you want), use apt-cdrom add to add your binaries CDs, then use apt-get -u dist-upgrade to upgrade the system; or

2) download the Debian-Installer ISO and install from it, adding your binaries CDs when it comes time to confgure apt.

Now, how do you know you're supposed to download the beta installer separately? Why, because you've drilled down to the /install/doc directory of the binaries CD and read INSTALLATION-HOWTO, of course. Otherwise, you might have missed it, since it's not prominently posted on the Debian site. (Not that I'm bitter or anything.)

So I tried to install Sarge.

I ended up trying both ways -- install Woody, then upgrade; or use the new beta installer -- with the same result.

When I told the installer to use my CDs, it scanned them, but later, when installing packages, the installer asked me over and over again to insert them, and for some reason, couldn't find them.

Even though the installer found my NIC and loaded the correct driver for it, after rebooting to the new system, my network didn't work. The agp kernel module that came with kernel 2.4.25-1-386 was incompatible with my chipset, so X wouldn't work except using the VGA driver. (Which is not a good thing when your system is set to boot to a graphical login.) My "sources.list" wasn't set to get the NVidia kernel -- not that I'm confident installing the NVidia kernel would have solved the agp problem. The final straw was when I looked at /etc/fstab and found no entries for my floppy, my CD-ROM, or my DVD-ROM. (No wonder the installer couldn't find the CDs!)

So, for now, I'm reinstalling Knoppix!!! I admit defeat. Anybody want some slightly used Debian Sid and Sarge CDs?