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First off, THANKS!!! I love what RedHat has done for Linux. I had very good luck on 5.1 (this problem wasn't there). I have talked to other people that have had this problem. Installing from FTP doesn't work. The dev package and the MAKEDEV package fail. (there is another package that hurls, but I can't remember what it is). Everything else works, but it doesn't matter (unless you can survive with an empty /dev directory :) Installing from a local hard drive image DOES work (I ended up downloading the entire RMPS and base directories), so I don't think it's something I did wrong. Thanks for your help (BTW, Oracle on RedHat is beautiful!)
After submitting this bug, I realized that I must have botched my original search. I read a few comments about the linuxconf package dying also. YES, that's the third one (that I couldn't remember) that I had problems with. Another note: When the box pops up about dev failing, on the screen behind the popup box, I see that the dev package is 0K (zero K). This might be normal--devs don't actually have data. Also: the package downloads correctly (I can see it in the download dest. directory when I switch to another VT), but the ramdisk system is tight enough that I don't have the tools to go behind the installer's back and install the package manually. AND... I just downloaded fresh boot.img and supp.img files from the redhat ftp server--as opposed to a mirror--to make sure I had the latest...
This is usually do to the large amount of time between the time that the installer makes the ftp connect and the first package is copied. The ftp server will time out and close the connection if the time is to great. We are aware of this and will have fixed it by the next release of Red Hat Linux.