From time to time (at least once a month) I get mail from someone who's
trying to install Slackware, but is getting errors like "Disk series A
not found" right when the installation phase begins.  This is almost always
a downloading error, and is caused by missing index files.  These files
(which have names like diska1, diska2, etc) are needed for "setup" to
recognize a directory full of packages as being a Slackware software set.

In fact, there should be one of these in *this directory* with the name diska1.
If it (or any of the other index files in the other software directories) are
missing, you can expect to run into some problems.

From the reports I've received, this problem is most commonly caused by 
downloading the files with DOS-based web browsers (some of which can corrupt
binary files in other ways as well) or by using a wildcard of *.* when 
downloading.  In the DOS world, *.* is often used to specify "all files", but
in the UNIX world * is the proper wildcard to use to match everything.

Hope this well-placed mini-FAQ helps some people. :^)

-- Pat