In article <3CCD4121.3060201@innovision.com> you write:
>I don't have the CD, I FTP'd the debian CD's relevant binary 
>subdirectories.  "...downloaded the CD..." was a really bad way for me 
>to phrase that.  

I had hoped that this was the case.

>could be missing something else...possibly, I need binary-all?  When I 
>attempt to install packages, I see error messages that indicate dselect 
>is looking in dists/potato/main rather than dists/stable/main.  

dists/stable/main should be symlinked to dists/potato/main.  You might
check that.

In any 
>case, I thought there might be something obvious and boneheaded I was 
>doing wrong.  I haven't put in an honest effort to resolve this I guess. 
> Ordering the Debian CD is probably the easiest way to go.

I've heard of issues when downloading trees in ascii mode vs binary mode
via ftp, there's a remote possibility that this is related.  Do you have a
fast conection to the internet?  If so then the easiest way to to select
an ftp install (http usually works from behind a firewall) and let it
roll.

Regards,

-Don