The Incredible State of Almost
Looking around Distrowatch a bit, I found a few more possible candidates for icelandic. Of these, I decided to try DeadCD. Last night I tried it.
As a run-from-CD thing, DeadCD is quite good. It found the hardware correctly, save perhaps for a sound card, which isn't a show-stopper. It found the network and set itself up to use it. It came up reasonably fast on a Pentium-166 and with the fluxbox window manager even the graphic mode is fairly responsive.
There is an option, using deadeasy from console to install to the hard drive. The installer shows some thought went into things. The first menu offers a choice of partitioning (using cfdisk), formatting, and the actual install itself. Partitioning and formatting work out fine, and the installer looks good. It warns that the progress bar makes big jumps but can spend a long time between jumps. It lets you edit lilo.conf and fstab during the install with an editor that has on-screen user hints. Overall, it looks wonderful, especially after the last couple distributions I tried. There are some artifacts of English as a Second Language, but I can let those go.
It was good that it was so impressive, as the one thing it did not do was install lilo correctly. This led to much fiddling around and many reboots, some with the CD, some with the DeLi boot disk(s) with much help from jmaynard. It got late before we got it working right. There is at least one more thing to try, and I do intend to e-mail the developer and ask what's going on. Considering the rest of DeadCD, it's rather odd to have such a basic thing as booting not work right. I suppose as the last resort, it could be updated to being a full-blown Debian (on which DeadCD is based) and fixed from there - but that seems just plain excessive.