Salix Forums

Try burning the CD in SAO mode. Some CD burners will (in my experience) give you coasters every time if you burn ISO images in TAO mode.

Format your USB stick to fat32 and make sure it's bootable (use fdisk to toggle the boot flag (a) on the partition): Copy the kernels and isolinux directories from the ISO image to the usb stick.
Rename the isolinux directory to syslinux and the isolinux.cfg below it to syslinux.cfg.
Install syslinux to the usb stick (umount your stick first): You should now have a bootable usb stick with the kernels and ramdisk (initrd) on it.

From this point proceed as normal until you come to selecting your installation source, choose the Install from FTP/HTTP server option.
You'll need to provide the HTTP URL (FTP doesn't work with ISO images and the 'download, install and wipe' of individual packages is very slow) for the server at the first dialog box (e.g. http://sunet.dl.sourceforge.net) and the path to the ISO image in the second dialog box (e.g. /project/salix/13.37/salix-xfce-13.37.iso). All being well the ISO image should be mounted using httpfs2 and you should see a success message.

All that's left to do is select which installation mode you want (core, basic or full).

Hope this helps.

Next time I'm going to try the method lmello linked to above. However, as a diagnostic step, you could use Brasero or whatever to create an .iso file from the CD in order to find its md5sum. If the sum is bad, you know for certain it was the burn. As gapan said, a correct md5sum doesn't completely exclude the possibiilty of a bad burn or even a bad download (though the fact the iso worked in a VM makes the latter seem unlikely).

No doubt there is a way of doing this directly from the disk without the intermediate step of copying it as an image, just by mounting it in the right way.

If you want to install from the USB stick then follow the same instructions above but copy the rest of the contents of the ISO (or the ISO itself) to the stick and select the Install from a hard disk partition option instead.

I tried to install Salix 13.37, using the same CD, on another machine. While there wasn't any warnings about broken packages, in the end I found out the X environment to be unusable - not one single application, such as Thunar or Terminal, would start.

If you've got some different CD media (different brand) then I'd try that first. You might want to check the manual for your drive to see which brands it prefers as well.
If that doesn't work then you might want to try a lens cleaning kit (if you can find one cheap enough) or consider changing the drive.

pwatk wrote:you might want to try a lens cleaning kit (if you can find one cheap enough) or consider changing the drive.

Forget the lens cleaning kit. Better buy a new drive for few bucks then Cheapest DVD writer I've found is rated below 16 € and you can be sure that you have a working drive.

... or try one of the USB install methods discussed above - without spending a penny

I have also experienced similar problems to the original poster with 13.37 (md5 checks OK) Yet live CDs made using 13.1.2 do not have this installation problem.
I am thinking of trying the USB install approach as suggested above to resolve this matter.