I am running on a smooth running install of Debian testing from last november, updated daily. No problems.

Now I need to install a couple other installs for research purposes and the Installer is giving me fits. Not the installer on any particular disk but on every disk I have tried.

What I am wanting is a stable, testing and sid install. So I get a wheezy install disk. Install in two places and the buggers would not boot or connect to the internet.

So I mess with them for a while with gdm and network packages (reinstall and reconfigure) (tty) to no good end. Upgrade them both to sid (chroot). One would boot to a root desktop. Got it running in a limping manner. The other not.

Started over with wheezy netinstall. Thought it would work but it went the same way. As I really want clean installs I wiped both again.

Same deal with the normal Stable install disk. Did not try the netinstall on that one.

Never tried a Debian Live CD before so I got one. Squeeze was really my least needed install (just a backup to the install I am using now, just incase). Have done 3 installs from that download. They all come out different but none work. I had one that lasted 3 days and then gave up on kernel crashes.

That one I had a little trouble getting to connect but got it going.

the one I did today will connect but not boot except through recovery to the root desktop.

All of these disks downloaded very nicely and the md5sum was perfect. Burned slow. All booted great. The Live CD works great as a Live CD.

I have not tried the Live CD as a rescue disk yet. Probably will before giving up on this current install. Might pull it out but I don't really see what I can do there that can't be done from chroot, tty or the root desktop.

The root desktop works great for a while and then gradually degrades and things like the terminals will not come up. Reboot and all is well again.

Can't get to the normal user desktop at all.

Seeing the things that I am doing to get function, it has got to start with a faulty install.

Somebody out there, I hope, is rolling on the floor having a great laugh at my stupid mistake. I hope they will share the joke with me. I promise to laugh too.

None of these installs is all that important. Wheezy I just want to play with. Sid I just want a small install of so I can try Gimp7.x (7.2 currently). Squeeze I thought would be a nice "spare" in case I "improve" this Testing install too much, as I am very good at that.

My install also ended with me not having gdm, but it complained about var/xxx/xxx/run.
It was suggested by another thread to do
"rm -rf /run"
After doing that I reboot then it has gdm.
Not sure if it would work for you, but it worked in my case.

I have not seen that particular error, yet, but that is handy to know. The way things are going I will probably have a chance to try it.

May have to try the Stable net install. Should be able to ensure that I have a gdm that way, at least if the bugger will connect.

The 2 times that I installed wheezy it happened. Only terminal available.

Install only 'base' and 'standard' Squeeze then upgrade to either Testing or sid, then install the desktop you want/need. The fewer packages to upgrade the fewer issues you will run into.

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I will try that. It did not work in Wheezy although I finally did get some function.

I did better in Wheezy by finally installing with nothing marked an installing everything myself but it still didn't really work right.

I will down load the netinstall for Squeeze right now.

Alright, finally had a chance to install the Squeeze netinstall. I am on it now so it did boot up.

I am sending this from there so the network works.

However there really seems to be some problems installing. I installed the desktop and core utilities. Trying to open nautilus as root I get:
I installed nautilus-gksu and nautilus-open-terminal. Neither shows up on the right click menu for nautilus.

Gnome-alsamixer and gparted were also installed, showed up in the menus and seem to work fine.

Trying to open gedit;
Update/upgrade went fine.

The bugger is better than the other installs I have tried but it is still not installed right obviously. I will play with it some more and certainly hope to correct these problems but would really like to know what the deal here is with the installer.

OK, did some messing around and have most things working after a reboot.

Using;
gives me that warning but also gives me a usable gedit.

Nautilus now has the menu items.

I had similar issues installing off of Testing ISO and had to take the route craigeveil suggested. I also had the same issue trying crunchbang which I believe is based on Debian Testing. --> Would be nice if this got fixed I still can't test drive Crunchbang. All is well now w/ Wheezy though ....

Try using sux

$sux hit enter
Password: enter root password
gedit /etc/apt/sources.list

Or use nano
su
Password:
nano /etc/apt/sources.list

Although gksu should work

Well, I must say your language is coarse!! sux? Never heard of that one, ignorance is bliss I guess. What on earth is this?

It does seem right to use in this situation which, in some ways at least, sucks. The install works pretty well and I am sure it will get better.

I actually did use nano to take a look at the sources list. I wanted to do that before running update/upgrade because on most of the recient installs all that was there was the listing for the CD. This time it was right. Even had the security section which the one install that I did that listed something other than the CD did not.

I am back on my testing install and running boinc. I have to time my exits from here to cater to one of the projects (The Clean Energy Project - Phase 2) which has huge work units with few checkpoints. If you leave you can loose hours of crunching time.

When it becomes safe to leave I must go and check my 11.10 install to see exactly why some things are held back and then I will be going to the Squeeze install to see what I may have done to it in chroot (have to improve things). I will try the sux command (I really need to look that one up).

I see you have to install sux to use it.

In case you were taking me seriously about the "coarse language", I am a ranch hand. While some of us do not use coarse language I doubt any are shocked by it. I find it a great stress reliever myself.

It is probably good that the command isn't fux. It may have put me on the floor for a while. I also would have used it at any time possible.