DeLi Linux installer saying 'failed to mount the source device'

Q It was good to see DeLi Linux, as I have a 486 PC that I thought would be good to learn on. Burning the CD and the boot floppy went well, as did the install until a pane appeared asking 'Where is delibase.tgz?' Part of the pane states 'I can scan for CD-Rom drives. Should I try to do so?'. Clicking on Yes gives another pane asking me to 'Enter the device which contains the DeLi Linux Base Package delibase.tgz'No matter what I put in there I get the message 'ERROR! Failed to mount the source device. Exiting ...' and that's it. I had copied that file to C:\, because that was one of the locations stated in the original pane 'Where is... etc' - however, when I try to enter C:\ I can only get C:#.

A It appears that your installer was unable to detect your CD drive. This is possible if it is not a standard ATAPI IDE device. The fact that you needed to create a boot disk indicates that this may be the case. Your inability to type 'C:\' is almost certainly caused by an incorrect keymap, which maps symbols differently to your keyboard. The \ character is there, but you'd have to keep pressing keys until you found the right one. This is similar to the problems I have finding # and @ when I boot a Live CD that insists on using a US keymap with my UK keyboard. You can usually avoid playing hunt the key by choosing the correct keyboard earlier in the installation, or you'll experience the same problem when you try to use DeLi Linux. Good luck with DeLi Linux: running anything on a 486 is going to seem like hard work. You may also like to try out Damn Small Linux - this is another distro designed to be lightweight.

Back to the list