He may have downloaded the rescue disk which does not have any GUI. What the full name of the iso? debian-live-6.0.2-amd64-rescue.iso by chance?

I got the ISO from http://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/...86/iso-hybrid/ , and as far as I know, what I have is the "standard" ISO listed on that page. I know that because the standard ISO's size is 275 MB, and that's the size of the contents of my Debian liveCD.

If the "standard" ISO doesn't come with a GUI (I must have supposed it did) or all the software needed to connect to a network easily, I guess I could try the LXDE or XFCE version. They probably don't include the needed network software either, but if they have a GUI, at least they would be easier to work with while I solve the problem.

Did I need to download the corresponding .iso.packages file? Maybe I should have assumed so, but nothing on the page (or http://www.debian.org/CD/live/, the page I got there from) said clearly (in language obvious enough for a novice to understand) that I was required to. And if I had downloaded the .iso.packages, I wouldn't have been sure what to do with it.

The standard disk is to small to have any GUI on it. And even Lxde is to large for a CD.

If you can't burn to a DVD then maybe you can use a USB stick.

http://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/.../i386/usb-hdd/

then read this http://live.debian.net/manual/en/htm...asics.html#181

I've got a stick with 2.3 GB remaining...guess I could use it. Which is easier, LXDE or Xfce?

Oh, I forgot...you can't burn an ISO onto a USB stick (unless you're burning Puppy Linux). Looks I will be forced to break down and buy some DVDs. ?!X@ technology...

Did you establish a connection with live-cd to install?

Working on it (with the Xfce version). Every time I try the installer, it takes an awfully long time to finish detecting (or not detecting) my network hardware. I think I'll leave the installer running before I go to work, and see whether it ever finishes or whether it's getting hung up indefinitely.

there's a netinstall with non-free firmware here.
http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/debian-installer/

Actually the Gnome DVD contains the Gnome environment and is 1.1 GB, the standard CD is a bar bones cli system of less than 300 MB, standard-x11 (which is a LiveBuild option) contains x, rescue is rescue, Gnome is Gnome etc etc etc.

If you want a GUI choose one of the 4 gui types which are Gnome, KDE, LXDE, XFCE and they appear on that page in that general order.

I'm pretty confident they contain network software.

Just download the iso for installing, iso.packages is just a list of packages on the iso.

You can actually, that is why they are "hybrid". You can use Unetbootin or if you are mega patient a some of us are working on a Grub2 iso workaround, I have it working with 8 versions of Debian on my flash drive for multiboots.

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Thank you, good people...putting the other Linux installation's RT61 package on a USB drive and then using dpkg -i on it solved the network problem. After a lot of wrestling with the very touchy Debian installer (nothing related to my network), I got it installed. (I was disappointed that it had to take over the bootloader like every distro I know. Why can't a new distro ever just add lines for itself in the menu.lst of another installation specified by the user? Maybe I want to keep the old menu.lst, with the particular order that it listed available Linux installations in, its particular time count before automatically loading a distro, etc.)

I did it with now ethernet either. I just used sneakernet(put on my sneakers, went to the library, found the driver .deb package, and put it on a jump dive, then went home and stuck it in the usb hole. It's that simple.