I have tried to download Puppy 5.1.1 ISO from a couple of different sites and each one does the same thing. During the initial boot from CD I get:

uncompression error
-System halted

The MD5 sum verifies.

Any ideas? TIA.

The md5sum for the iso verifies ?

Run:

with the disk inside. It should say EOF on puppy.iso.

Did you burn the puppy.iso file to the CD as an image or as a file?
In other words, if you open the CD, do you see all the files on it or just the puppy.iso file?
The puppy.iso file needs to be burnt to the CD as an image.

Thanks for the help but I have, for the moment, given up on Puppy and am trying TCL (Tiny Core Linux). I am having some trouble installing JRE on it so I may revisit Puppy.

However, the ISO checks out with MD5 and 'cmp' so I'm not sure what to make of it. The ISO was burned as an image to the CD but as I said it does boot up to the prompt but after hitting enter it reads for a moment then displays the error. Since all my other installs with other distros work, except for poor performance which is why I'm looking for a low memory distro, I have to believe it is either a problem with the ISO or some hardware incompatibility with this particular distro.

I haven't tried 5.1.1, but 4.3.1 worked great for me after burning it slower. I can't remember for sure, but I think I had to burn it at 8X. The first two I burned at higher speeds would not work.

certainly worth a try, i had that prob many a time