Greetings. I've been using knoppix 3.2 for about a year now on my Compaq 2105us; it's been my favorite linux distro to date. But it is not without challenges. I had tried going straight Debian, but Knoppix has superior hardware detection.

So, I get Knoppix installed on the hdd, but that doesn't give me perl-doc. No problem, apt-get install perl-doc...which fails utterly. So I read through the apt howto and some Debian faqs, where I get the sage advice to try letting dselect just do it's thing. This, in turn, downloads all kinds of stuff and breaks X. The reason I went with Knoppix instead of straight Debian is that Knoppix gets X working right out of the gate, whereas several tries at installing X (including building from source) failed under Debian on this machine.

Back to square one. I am about to re-install knoppix 3.2. Then I'm going to fire up dselect, but this time I'm going to tell it to put all packages on hold. And then I'm going to try to slowly, one app-plus-dependencies at a time, try to get perl-doc.

Unless some kind soul here has a better suggestion. All pointers welcome.