MEPIS Community Forum

After booting the 635MB Simply Mepis CD I tried to run the Synaptic Package Manager and got

E: Unable to write to /var/cache/apt/
E: The package lists or status file could not be parsed or opened.
E: _cache->open() failed, please report.

W: Not using locking for read only lock file /var/lib/dpkg/lock

Please tell me what I am missing.

Thank you

David

You need to boot the CD using the R/W -- aufs option.

It should be available as one of the choices at the CD's grub menu.


edit:
On second thought, what Mepis version is this? Looking at the iso sizes here: here and here, I don't see any isos weighing in at 635 MB. I think you might be using a very old version of Mepis (before there was a R/W -- aufs option). On older Mepis versions (Mepis 6.x and earlier) you weren't able to use Synaptic or apt-get while running the LiveCD, you could after installing to harddrive. If the version you have is that old I wouldn't install it anyway.