Probs installing on a 6500/250

[guillaume]

hiya,

first post to this list, not sure if an introduction is required (hi!) ;-)

i downloaded and burnt YDL 2.3 last week so i could install it on my old
trusty powermac 6500/250; i checked the requirements and supported hardware
information, and everything should be fine, except perhaps for the installed
RAM (64mb - i'm guessing that's enough, i haven't found any doc saying
otherwise), more than enough disk space (4gb, excluding a mac partition of
about 700mb) and the comm slot II ethernet card seems to fit in the
supported NICs.

i've got some experience with linux, at least for installing, but so far
i've only used it on PCs (redhat from 7.x to 8.0 mostly), never on a Mac;
for the past week, i've set partitions, deleted them, re-partitioned the
disk and every single installation has failed. i'll get as far as the stage
where the installer is resolving package dependencies, but comes to a dead
stop, which lasts a couple of minutes, and then displays a cryptic error
message and announces the machine will reboot in a couple of hundred
seconds.

i re-read the installation manual, the partitioning doesn't seem to be the
problem, but i can't figure out why the installer comes to a dead stop every
single time. for the record, i tried both the x11 GUI and text-mode
installers, same error happens; but i haven't tried installing with the
vmlinux-2.2 kernel, only the 'standard' 2.4 one. could my selection of
kernel be the problem?

any help is greatly appreciated !

alex