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!
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.
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. provide a formatted 1.44 MB floppy for it to write on. In a few minutes or less, you will have a bootable image.
If you are tight on space, lump /usr, /var and /home together.
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.
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.
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.
You're Done!!
The first thing you need to do is install Red Hat Linux on your computer in EPS 259.
Make sure that you record your activities in your log. Especially any numbers that you entered - like IP address, subnet masks, etc. Also, start keeping track of any changes that you make. For example, if you edit /etc/hosts, make a notation of it. If you need to reinstall at some point, these notes will be worth their weight in gold.
Normally, leave your systems running, but you can turn the monitor off. This will allow me to run the tests necessary to check on your progress. I will begin pinging your systems to see if they are up and running during the next week or so.