Hello,
I recently downloaded and installed antiX on an IBM Thinkpad T21 with 256MB of ram. It actually went well to start with. I used a TEW 424UB USB wifi adapter and got that working pretty easily (had to change from the default option in the setup to get an ip address).

However, I want this for the family to use so I tried installing fvwm-crystal and xfce4 through the meta-installer. I haven't got this to work though __{{emoticon}}__

For crystal it complains about some package missing (hadak?). For xfce4 (and lilghtxfce4) it complains about thunar-thumbnails.

From a root terminal I tried apt-get update and then apt-get upgrade and that downloaded and installed a bunch of packages and seemed to go OK. However still the issue with the window managers. I then tried a apt-get dist-upgrade and still no go.

I did get a slightly different error about mepis so I changed /etc/apt/sources.list based on a web page I found, but after that it was still the same story.

Where do I go from here?

Thanks.

Which version of antiX?

inxi -Fr gives us a lot of useful information.

Thanks the image I used was antiX-M8.5-base-686.iso - I'll run the command when I get home later and paste those results.

Probably the old metapackage installer was pointing to currently obsoleted packages (like thunar now uses tumbler for thumbnails). Use Synaptic or apt/aptitude to install the packages you need.

i totally agree with secipolla,
synaptic is an easy program that works kinda the same as the metapackage installer so why not use that?
just install it by typing apt-get install synaptic as root in the terminal.
or why not install everything via the terminal with apt-get install? it's really easy.
if you would ask me, i would stop worrying about the metapackage installer and go for one of these alternatives.
and since you are new: welcome to the forum!

Thanks. I did try installing fvwm-crystal from the terminal with apt-get and it did seem to go through.

However, I couldn't invoke the window manager from anywhere. I guess that's down to me not being too familiar with slim or some other part of the process. I assumed that the meta-installer would add menu-options or something else along those lines to actually invoke that wm. I'll try some experimentation tonight ....

have you tried pressing f1 during login?

You have to add the fvwm entry in /etc/slim.conf if it isn't there already (use the name of its executable). And then choose it with F1 in the login screen.

Thanks for the various pointers. I am actually using e17 and thinking that this could be the way to go ....
and learning more about linux (and now antiX) all the time __{{emoticon}}__