[plug] Debian installation

[Dave Dartnall]

At the recent (late last year?) installfest at Computer Angels, I bought 
a set (7) of debian 3.0 disks, and following attendance at the linux 
conference have been motivated to install it.

The documentation indicates that the disks are self-booting, but that 
doesn't work for me although the debian boot disk which was produced 
during installation does work - takes for ever tho'.
What could happen at boot time when the computer refuses to look at the 
cdrom with the bios set to see it, but happily accesses the floppy (with 
bios set to a) ?
Installation was consequently achieved by dd from cdrom producing three 
floppy disks - linux, rescue, and root. The result of this process was 
successful in that the boot disk referred to above results in an active 
bash shell. No Xwindows.
Startx produces the following error messages:

    (EE) Unable to locate/open config file
    (EE) Error fron xf86HandleConfigFile()

    fatal server error 'no screens found'
    (NI) not implemented
    cannot open APM

I've tried running xf86config which hasn't helped!

Where can I go from here?

regards
Dave Dartnall