How to avoid Syslinux 6.03 error “Failed to load ldlinux.c32” while booting Linux from a USB

I got this error while trying to boot Slax off a USB for my previous post. I had created the bootable drive using Rufus 3.13, a well known bootable USB creator. When Rufus encounters older distribution images, it downloads Syslinux 6.03 files ldlinux.bss and ldlinux.sys to include in the drive’s boot folder. But because of whatever reason all the older ISOs Syslinux 6.03 I’ve burnt with Rufus always fail to boot. I’ve encountered this problem multiple times.

(Image source: AskUbuntu.com)

My solution to this was to use UNetBootin for creating the bootable USB and basically avoid this problem altogether. Other people on various forums have also had the same conclusion, i.e. using a different ISO to USB tool like Win32 Disk Imager, etc.

I’m pretty curious about why this is happening. I tried doing a lot of stuff like manually putting in Syslinux 6.03 files from kernel.org but nothing worked other than changing the USB tool. Might make a post about this later if I find something interesting.

[Slax Linux 9.11/Debian Stretch] How To Add A Battery Indicator To The Fluxbox Toolbar

One of my readers, Niteen, asked me if I could help install a battery indicator next to the system tray in Slax. So I did some digging and found a way.

cbatticon is a nice battery indicator applet that works well with Fluxbox. Cbatticon is available on the Debian package repositories. The problem is, it is not available for Debian Stretch off of which Slax 9.11 is based. That’s why using “apt search cbatticon” doesn’t yield any results.

 

We can still install it, though.  First, we’ll install all the dependencies of cbatticon with the command:

apt-get install libatk1.0-0 libc6 libc6 libcairo-gobject2 libcairo2 libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0 libglib2.0-0 libgtk-3-0 libnotify-bin libnotify4 libpango-1.0-0 libpangocairo-1.0-0

Then we download the Debian Buster amd64 package from the Debian package repositories.

After downloading the package, we navigate to the directory where the package was downloaded and install it with dpkg. Use the command:

cd Downloads
dpkg -i cbatticon_1.6.8-1_amd64.deb

After installing the package, we can launch it by using the terminal.

cbatticon &

To get cbatticon to start automatically with every login, we need to edit Fluxbox’s configuration files. Go to “$HOME/.fluxbox/” and open the file “apps” in a text editor.

cd $HOME/.fluxbox/
nano apps

Add the following line to the top of the file. (Thanks to the good folks at LinuxQuestions.org for this information)

[startup]{cbatticon &}

Then, log out and log back in and you’ll see cbatticon start automatically when you log in.