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Installing Linux

 

Preparation

Contents

Installing An OS

In order to make this all happen, you need to be able to boot your system up under a system that can read the media that contains the installation copy of your operating system. This is typically easy these days, because most system BIOS's will boot from the CD-ROM, a floppy or a hard drive. In fact, this is so common that most suppliers of OS's send you their installations on a CD; you put the CD in, you start the system, it boots by reading some stuff from the CD, and then it goes through the installation process. Voila!

If your system boots but insists on booting from the hard drive, you may have to enter the BIOS setup and change the boot order. This varies from BIOS to BIOS and from version to version, so you need to figure this out.

The bad news is that some systems won't boot from a CD. When this happens, you need to create a bootable floppy for you OS. You boot up with the floppy and it has a program that reads the CD and gets everything else going. Since Red Hat doesn't ship a bootable floppy with their installation sets, you need to create one.

Some systems don't have CD's, and then you need an alternative install procedure, such as installing over the network using FTP or HTTP. This is common for Linux.

If you don't have access to the network and no CD-ROM (a handheld maybe) you might have to install over a serial line, from a ZIP disk or possibly by flashing Linux into your EEPROM. All of these things are not common and will require some preparation.

Creating CD's and/or Floppies

You typically create CD's by copying the iso image files to a CD-R or CD-RW. Linux provides cdrecord or xcdroast (as well as other packages) and Windows has many utilities, such as Adaptec Easy CD Creator. The iso files are duplicates of CD's in ISO 9660 format, which is what you find on a data CD.

To burn CD's or images, you need to download them. You can find almost any distribution at LinuxISO. Fedora Core 3 distribution iso's can be downloaded at Fedora Download site.

To create floppies, you need to download the floppy disk image files (an exact duplicate of a floppy disk, sector-by-sector). You can use dd under Linux, or rawrite under Windows. You have to provide a formatted 1.44 MB floppy for it to write on. In a few minutes or less, you will have a bootable image.

Create Install Docs

You can also put an operating system image on a zip disk and boot from that but that won't be discussed here.

The Red Hat Linux Install Procedure

  1. Know your hardware

    Install Docs

    Plan the installation

Answers to Questions

Rather than going through the install procedure in laborious detail, read about it in the Install Manual. Here are some details that you may find useful. In general, the default choices are correct for most things.

Type of Installation

The type of installation is unique to Red Hat. You can pick workstation, but it will not install some stuff that you want. You also don't want server, since it installs a lot of stuff you don't want. So choose custom. When you select a package group for installation, you may want to click the Details icon and see what is or is not included by default.

Caution!! If you choose a Server install, it assumes you want the machine to be Linux only, which can be a real disappointment if you have a Windows installation you want to keep because it will be gone when you're done.

Disk Partitioning Disks

It will let you choose Continue to automatically partition or Custom. If you choose custom, it will show you two choices for the partitioning, fdisk or Disk Druid. Choose Disk Druid. The default is OK for this class, but not for a production system.

Since these systems have been used before, you may want to start by deleting all existing partitions.

Booting

Network Configuration

Security Level

The default is Medium, and that is a good choice. Low leaves your system open to a number of hacks, and High sets protections so tight that you can't do much of anything.

Account and Authentication Configuration

You're Done!!

Startup and Shutdown

Rescue CD

Linux used to have rescue floppies, but it has gotten too large for that unless you go to a generic boot floppy. But you should have some type of rescue media handy, so you should consider getting a CD-based distribution like Knoppix, or you should burn the Fedora rescue CD. The iso image is typically available whereever you you get the distribution iso's.

Assignment

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