Red Hat Installation

[Richard Royston]

The hard part was due to the fact that I already had Windows 95 on my system.

So I had to create a new partition.

So I had to have a defragged disk.

So I had to switch off the swap file, to prevent bad stuff getting onto my
disk when I thought everything was O.K.

Well Windows 95 tries to intimidate you by threatening you with the possibility
that your system might not run, and they don't tell you how to judge when
there'll really be aproblem, so I just guessed 16 MB would be enough RAM if I
didn't try to do too much, and winged it.

Then I ran defrag, in Windows (to preserve the long file names), and
immediately (but gently) shut down the system.

Then, having a bootable version of DOS (6.0, I think, to keep up with Windows
95), and fips, etc, I brought my system up under good old DOS, and ran fips
to create a second partition after Windows 95, but leaving enough space for
Windows 95 to run (and grow a little more).

Then I started on Red Hat.  The instructions are quite clear.

Fairly early on you get to make linux partitions - I did one for / (for all
my linux) and one for swap (at the end) - my swap partition was 16 MB. linux
got all the rest that was in the middle.  You do this in fdisk.

Then I loaded linux.

They wanted all sorts of information on my graphics card and my monitor.  The
graphics card manual is liable to be fairly generic (if you even have one),
so it might be a good idea to take a look at the chips on your card, and
make a note of all the interesting ones.  You'll find out when you get to
the setup menu which ones the install procedure thinks significant, but it's
too late to look at the graphics card then!  It will also expect you to know
all about the resolutions, frequencies, and interlacedness or otherwise of your
monitor at various resolutions.

You need to know what sort of mouse and K/B you have too - things I don't
generally make a point of knowing all the technical details about.  The
installation procedure had done some probing to help here.

I didn't bother with the Metro-X server for X, and seemed to get on O.K.  But
now I'm getting into regular hacking.

Having a new computer, it has a 2 GB disk, so I told it to load everything.
Some people may need help and guidance with selecting package sets.

We'd better have a Windows (or some Microsoft) based system in case we need to
prepare DOS disks for fips, or whatever.

Glenn Burkhardt says that when he ran the installation Red Hat tried to run
Xprobe (or something) and he let it, and it crashed and locked up his system,
and he had to power cycle it.

You can't exit and rejoin the install procedure, so if you make a mistake you
get to repeat a number of things, although most of the packages can be
omitted on repeat runs.

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Richard J. Royston                             AOI International Division
richard at aoi.ultranet.com                       Triple I Corporation
(508) 937-5400 x218 voice                      847 Rogers Street #1-LRC
(508) 453-5731 fax                             Lowell, MA 01852