problem installing from live cd 13.0

[mimosa]

I fell in love with this distro after downloading - it is elegant, intuitive, lightweight, beautiful and everything just works, even wireless.

I'm having trouble, though, installing. Gparted won't let me 'unlock' my extended partition, which appears to be mounted. Could this be because Salix is using swap, which on this machine is on the extended partition? In any case, I am not root (automatic login as "one", forbidden to login as "root"), which I suspect might solve the problem. Su in console works, but I still didn't manage to unmount these partitions, which was what made me think the use of swap could be contributing to the difficulty.

I'm running Salix Live off a USB, by the way, because the CD/DVD drive on this machine is broken. I had problems with the shell script .sh as mentioned in previous posts here, but the Windows version .bat did the job. At least, it says "boot error" after I try and boot it from the grub commandline, but then boots successfully when I hit enter. It works.

Grateful for any suggestions or ideas! How to become root in the GUI, or whatever else might get round the problem.

[gapan]

Did you try unmounting any partitions and turning off swap first?

[mimosa]

As far as I can tell it won`t let me, though I`m not really sure how to go about those two things, particularly turning off swap. I tried booting without swap but I don`t think my edit was taken account of. I managed to log in as root by booting to runlevel 3 (so that edit did work), and Gparted lets me unmount things, but they remount themselves - and in the installer, when I click to say OK I really do want to use partition X, the dialogue box stays there and nothing happens. All this running as root with a bloodshot penguin staring at me.

[gapan]

Don't run as root, it's bad practice and dangerous. Just open a terminal window and run su to become root.

You can view a list of mounted partitions with

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mount

unmount a partitions with

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umount /dev/sdX

(replace sdX with the partition you want to unmount)
and turn all swap off with

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swapoff -a

[mimosa]

That worked in that all partitions then appeared as unlocked in Gparted. I had created two new partitions for Salix within unallocated space which were not visible to the installer, though they continue to appear in Gparted. After logging off as root and back on as One, I deleted these and recreated them just in case. During this Gparted kept complaining it couldn`t mount various other partitions because I was not root, but created the new ones as before just the same. However, these are still not visible to the installer, and when I attempted to select an existing partition for Salix, it reacted as before when I clicked on OK to confirm - nothing happened.

[Akuna]

However, these are still not visible to the installer, and when I attempted to select an existing partition for Salix, it reacted as before when I clicked on OK to confirm - nothing happened.

This looks like it could be because of a bug in the installer (which has been fixed is on SVN).

This is what you can do:

1- From within a SalixLive cession, download this file: http://salix.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc ... ision=1023 (it is very important you take this revision of the installer & not the latest one which is *not* compatible with salixlive-13.0)

(The following will have to be done as root in a terminal)

2- Make the downloaded file executable:

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chmod +x /path/to/the/downloaded/salix-live-installer.py

3- Copy the downloaded file over the existing one:

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cp /path/to/the/downloaded/salix-live-installer.py /usr/sbin

4- Launch the new installer (from the terminal so that you can catch any eventual error messages)

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salix-live-installer.py

This should fix your problem. If it doesn't, please post the eventual error messages displayed in the terminal.

Tx

[mimosa]

That didn`t quite do the trick. This time, my new partitions appeared, but again, clicking ok to proceed did nothing. Here are the error messages

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root[one]# umount /dev/sda*
umount: /dev/sda: not mounted
umount: /dev/sda2: not mounted
umount: /dev/sda6: not mounted
root[one]# chmod +x /home/one/Download/salix-live-installer.py
root[one]# cp /home/one/Download/salix-live-installer.py /usr/sbin
root[one]# salix-live-installer.py
The ntpd is already running with pid: 12192 12187
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/sbin/salix-live-installer.py", line 1491, in on_confirm_button_clicked
    self.WindowsPartitionListStore.append(set)
ValueError: row sequence has wrong length
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/sbin/salix-live-installer.py", line 1466, in on_confirm_button_clicked
    self.LinuxPartitionListStore.append(set)
ValueError: row sequence has wrong length
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/sbin/salix-live-installer.py", line 1466, in on_confirm_button_clicked
    self.LinuxPartitionListStore.append(set)
ValueError: row sequence has wrong length

Note the different line number (1466) on second attempt.

To check I downloaded the right file and successfully copied it

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root[one]# md5sum /home/one/Download/salix-live-installer.py
ff39657a2001c677ec93e6a81763d7bb  /home/one/Download/salix-live-installer.py

root[one]# md5sum /usr/sbin/salix-live-installer.py
ff39657a2001c677ec93e6a81763d7bb  /usr/sbin/salix-live-installer.py

[Akuna]

Tx, these are very useful infos.

Could you please also give me the output of:

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fdisk -l

[mimosa]

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root[one]# fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x000e7729

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1               1        1024     8225248+   7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2   *        1158       19458   146988414    f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda5            1159        6829    45552307+   b  W95 FAT32
/dev/sda6            8579        8921     2755116   82  Linux swap
/dev/sda7            8999        9727     5855661   83  Linux
/dev/sda8            9728       18795    72838678+  83  Linux
/dev/sda9           18796       19458     5318656   83  Linux
/dev/sda10           7484        8134     5229126   83  Linux
/dev/sda11           8135        8578     3566398+  83  Linux

Partition table entries are not in disk order

Disk /dev/sdb: 4007 MB, 4007657472 bytes
43 heads, 43 sectors/track, 4233 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 1849 * 512 = 946688 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x04030201

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1   *           1        4234     3913188    c  W95 FAT32 (LBA)

I`ve just downloaded the install disk (ie not live), and will give that a try, if I can get it on to a USB.

[mimosa]

PS Slightly off topic, but I wonder if you can advise - I didn't find documentation on this on the website. Using the install CD (which doesn't have the lovely Live CD installer!), it looks like my best option (given no CD/DVD drive on this machine) is "install from directory". But which files exactly should I put in the directory? The three folders isolinux - kernels - salix as they appear on the CD? If I open it with "Archive manager" in Ubuntu, instead of that I see a very long list of files that reminds me of when I installed Slackware.

If I do manage to install in this way, I can still keep fiddling with the LiveCD to try and improve its installation process.