Hey, I'm new here. My computor experience is fairly limited. I have decided to experiment linux on an old computor that was going to be disposed of so the stakes are low if I've already screwed something up. I believe the computor has an amd k6 processor and 516mb of ram. I formatted the hard drive and I've begun to install PClinuxOS. Not long into the boot I get this message:

Error Unable to mount loopfile system. Commands were:
losetup/dev/loop0 initrd/cdrom/livecd.sqfs
mount -r -t squashfs/dev/loop/0 initrd/loopfs

Dropping you into a limited shell
loading/initrd/bin/ash

I appreciate any hints, and the unintimidating environment you've provided for newbies like me!

Cheers,
Sideburnz

Looks like there was a problem mounting a filesystem from the CD-ROM. Did you check the MD5SUM of the ISO image that you downloaded to make sure it did not get corrupted? At the limited shell you can run the two commands it printed out and see if you get an exact error message -- they are:

I note you have an extra / in the /dev/loop0 in the second command that you've posted (I've removed it here in my post). All systems I'm familiar with use /dev/loop0 as the loopback device, not /dev/loop/0. If this is really what the install routine is trying to execute, it may be a bug -- that's why I suggest trying it by hand.

AMD K6 with 516MB of RAM, are you sure that you have an old machine with this much amount of RAM; the reason I am asking you the same is because probably less RAM could be one of the culprit.

I am sure you made sum type error in psecifying your RAM, unless you decided to upgrade it.

They certainly made a type of some sort. There's no way there's 516MB of RAM in a computer...512 maybe.

I ahve a PC with 48mb ram, and a thinkpad with 128 of which 120 is usable (graphics card) it is possible if u ahd like 2x 256 the an old 2mb RAM lol

Thanks for the help. I believe it is actually 512 mb of ram that I have (like I said, limited computor experience ). At any rate I shifted gears and now I'm typing to you from DSL. I think I'll fool around with this for a while.

Cheers,
Sideburnz

is it wor4ing now, and what distro is it?, SuSe has great hardware detection and is very easy for newbs to configure if u want to be pointed in the correct direction.

I have Damn Small Linux working right now. I'll keep SuSe in mind. I'm pretty impressed with how fast this is running on such an old computor.