Completely new, says "Error 2" and Improper Compression type
 

I'm new to Linux, and I know that many will say that I should start out with a more newb-friendly distro, but i'm willing to take the challenge, and appreciate any help anyone provides along the journey.

I have a friend who is a Slack user, and he was helping me earlier with what to do to get started. I downloaded the .iso files, burned the images onto CDs, and booted from the d1 CD. When it prompts me for the boot, and I type in "bare.i" and press Enter, it begins loading /kernels/bare.i/bzImage, Loading initrd.img, then outputs "Ready. Uncompressing Linux..." and then says "invalid compressed format (err=2) -- System halted".

The only thing I can think of is that I have WinRAR installed on my computer, and my windows system initially recognizes the .iso files as WinRAR archive files. I don't know if this is the problem or not, but if it is, I don't know how to get the files out of the .rar state, nor what to put them into.

Any help/ideas would be greatly appreciated!

Well, when you're booting up from CD, windows isn't loaded at all, so it's not interfering in any way. I don't recall ever having to manually enter a kernel name during the installation; just hitting Enter at that prompt and letting Slack use its defaults is usually the simplest way to go.

Also, welcome! :)

Today I spoke with my friend and he thought that it could be that my download was corrupt. This is a new computer that I just built, and I've been experiencing this sort of problem a lot recently, where downloads get messed up. I discovered that it's my firewall; when I disable it and then download, it comes out alright, so I'm going to revert to a different firewall than the one I'm using now (Norton), and try to DL it again.

Thanks for your help!

Sure thing, good luck! Let us know how it turns out :)

(oh, one thing that's nice (necessary) to know before starting the installation - find out your monitor's vertical and horizontal refresh rates. You'll need to enter them (some distros will play nice and take an educated guess, but as of the last time I installed Slack it still wants you to enter them during X setup), and if you guess and guess wrong, bad things can happen to your monitor, the nicest of which is it'll stop working. Most manufacturers post those somewhere on their websites, or in the technical specs of the site you bought your monitor from. Besides, it's just generally very useful information. </lecture>)

Cheers!

Hmm... Well, following some of my friend's advice, I re-DL'd the d1 ISO file and burned the image to a new CD. When I pressed "Enter" at the prompt "boot: ", it simply restarted the computer. So, I downloaded AGAIN, this time making sure it was without interruption, and I'm back to go again at the Err-2 "invalid compressed format".

My question concerning WinRAR was with regard to whether it might change anything in the file, or label the file with anything special immediately upon its download; something that the Linux boot is rejecting. Being pretty much new to the intricate details of software and OS's, I'm not sure if this sounds even remotely possible to someone who has deeper knowledge in the subject, but it's my best guess at this moment in time.

Any further thoughts or ideas? I could uninstall WinRAR and try the download again without that.... Or would it make a difference whether or not I'm burning the CD at a particularly high-accelerated write speed?

Thanks again for your help; it is much appreciated. =)

EDIT: Further insight: could it be that a program I'm running, or something that Windows is doing, is screwing up the file as it is being downloaded? This last time, I disabled the firewall I had on that was messing up other downloads, but this didn't help... Perhaps a hardware firewall in my router?

Well...if you're burning it at a really low write speed nowadays that could possibly do something integrity-wise, but I doubt that too-fast would be a problem.

There's also the question of, maybe it's just a bad iso. Where are you downloading it from, and what are you using to burn it?

At least in 10.2, you can get a pretty good educated guess out of it if you run "xorgsetup" and let it make its best guess on everything. Then youcan manually edit from there.

(xorgsetup isn't in your command path, so you'll need to cd into the directory it is in, which I THINK is /usr/X11R6/xorg/bin, but i can't remember)


As for the main problem of installation, make sure you downloaded the right architecture for your computer. When I just installed the newest, it booted into the disc and didn't install until I ran the install program, which always starts with partitioning your drive before you try to load anything).

When you partition your drive, be sure to give yourself a "swap" partition, as swapspace is very useful. I usually allocate 500-something megs for it (making sure to make it of the "linux swap" typE), give or take depending on how much physical RAM you've got.

rose_bud4201, I'm using InterVideo to burn and I'm using (on a friend's recommendation) ftp.heanet.ie, link

ftp://ftp.heanet.ie/mirrors/ftp.slac...ware-10.2-iso/