| Grabber Softwares: Enhance Your Computing |
Installing Red Hat Linux A basic install of this plug-and-play OS takes a half hour Over the years, Linux has matured as an operating system. Gone are the days when you had to be a Unix guru even to boot up—every distribution available today focuses on extreme ease of installation. This year, we chose to distribute Red Hat Linux 5.0 on our CD-ROM. There are many good reasons for this, the biggest being that Red Hat almost installs by itself. A 386 with 8 MB of RAM will do, but a 486 with 16 MB of RAM is a good start—RAM is cheap and the more RAM you have, the better the performance. A full install of Red Hat 5.0 will take about 540 MB—but if you are short on disk space, you can also get away with around 100 MB. You will naturally need a CD-ROM drive. Linux recognizes just about every CD-ROM drive, so anything with a speed of 2x upward should do. If you plan to run X Windows, you’ll need a VGA display, but if you are just looking at running Linux as a text based workstation, or as a server, just about any display (even a CGA) will do just fine. To integrate Linux into a network, you’ll want an Ethernet card. Linux has built-in support for most popular Ethernet cards (both ISA and PCI), so anything you can lay your hands on should be acceptable. Finally, you should ensure that you have a serial port for communication, a parallel port for printing, and a serial port (or a PS/2 mouse port) for mouse. All are optional, though you will need a mouse if you intend running X Windows. If your PC does not support booting off CD-ROM, you’ll also need two blank 3.5" diskettes. Ensure that your PC allows booting off diskettes, you may have to enable this in the system BIOS. Now you are almost ready to start In earlier PC Quest CD-ROMS, we shipped the Slackware distribution, which had an advantage over Red Hat Linux: you didn’t have to partition your hard disk—you could install it in your DOS partition. It was a plus point in those days as there was very little performance difference between this kind of install (called a UMSDOS install) and a native Linux partition. This has, however, changed drastically. Today’s native Linux file system offers such tremendous performance and security advantages that it no longer makes sense to do an UMSDOS install. Red Hat Linux does not offer a UMSDOS installation option for this reason. This means that you need to carefully consider this issue. In order to install Red Hat Linux on your computer, you need to create new partitions. Most of you will have your hard disks partitioned for Win 95 or a similar OS. This implies you need to shrink the Win/DOS partition to make room for the Linux partition, or make available a separate hard disk for this purpose. At this point, we should also point out that what we are now leading up to is no longer a half-hearted try-out install. This issue intends to make you use Linux in a production environment—as a server or as a workstation. Just like Win NT does not trust the FAT file system of DOS and makes you install NTFS if you want to have security of any sort, Red Hat Linux insists that you have a secure and stable Linux native file system. If you really want to try out Linux, use the single-floppy Linux demo that can be found on the CD-ROM. If you can afford doing so, then dedicate a hard disk to Linux. A 1 GB Linux hard disk will give you more functionality than a 2.1 GB hard disk under Win 95/NT. If you do not have a spare hard disk, then you need to shrink your Win/DOS partition to accommodate the Linux partition. Use the FIPS utility that can be found in the \DOSUTILS directory on the CD-ROM. If you would rather use a commercial utility for this, we can heartily recommend PowerQuest’s Partition Magic 3.x or later—it costs about Rs 3500. If you are serious about getting a good Linux server
running, make sure you have about 504 MB for Linux system and applications and another We will assume that you will use a 1 GB hard disk dedicated to Linux. Virtually every part of the install except the partitioning process remains the same. There are two ways of installing Linux—you can either install it with another operating system with a dual-boot option, or you can install it alone. For installing Linux only, you should have at least a 1.2 GB hard disk. For installing it with a dual-boot option, the size depends upon the space requirements of the other operating system. For instance, if you want only DOS for the second partition, you don’t need more than 100 MB of space. The simplest possible way of starting the installation process is to insert the CD-ROM into the drive and booting off it. This requires that your PC can boot off a CD-ROM and that the option is enabled in the BIOS (most new Pentiums allow this). You can also start the Linux installation directly from the CD-ROM. Go to the \DOSUTILS directory on the PCQ CD-ROM and run AUTOBOOT.BAT. If you have a SCSI bootable device, then, you’ll need to create the Linux boot and supplement disks before you start the installation. To make the disks, go to the \IMAGES directory of the CD-ROM and run makedisk.bat file. Keep two 1.44 MB floppy disks handy. You will be asked if you are using a color monitor. Even if you have a monochrome monitor, select yes because Linux will run in greyscale mode. This is followed by a screen asking you to specify the keyboard type (select default), and the type of media that contains the packages to be installed (selectCD-ROM). You are then asked to specify whether you’re upgrading or doing a fresh install. Choose the latter. The next prompt is an important one. It asks whether you have any SCSI adapters? If you have a SCSI bootable device, then you will need the Linux supplement disk. If you have an Iomega Zip drive installed, Linux recognizes it as a SCSI device. Don’t connect the zip drive now. You can always set it up later after the installation. The next part deals with disk partitioning After creating the Linux swap partition, note down the remaining hard disk size. The size specified here is 1 MB more than the actual. When you add partitions, you will be prompted to enter the partition size. Whatever be the number of partitions, ensure that the total disk space that you specify is 1 MB less than what Disk Druid displays. Press the F12 key to save changes and continue. You will be prompted to select the mount point. This is where all the Linux boot files will be located (Linux native partition). If it doesn’t prompt you for it, then highlight the Linux native partition and select the edit button in Disk Druid. Enter a ‘/’ when it asks you to specify the mount point and continue. The next two options prompt you to format the swap space and the Linux native partition. Both screens have an option to check for bad blocks while formatting. If you have a new hard disk, you can disable this option, as checking for bad blocks takes time. If you have an older hard disk, and are not sure whether it has bad blocks or not, you should enable this option. Also, note that at this point, you can switch between screens showing the log file, or the Linux shell prompt by pressing Alt+F1, F2, and F3. These can be useful if something goes wrong with the installation, and you’d like to check the log file for errors, or to go to the Linux shell prompt to check for installed directories. Next comes installing the software components. The installation program displays a dialog box showing the list of components. Use the spacebar to select or deselect an option. You can select from the various packages, or select all by going to the bottom of the list and selecting the everything option. Installing everything takes slightly more than 500 MB of space. Press continue and Linux starts copying all the files to the hard disk. This process takes about 20 minutes. After all the files are copied, Linux will detect your mouse, display adapter, and the monitor. In each case, it displays a list of devices to choose from. Select from the list of devices that pop up. If you’re not sure of which mouse and monitor you have, select Microsoft compatible mouse, and generic monitor options. When it asks you to set up the default resolution and color depth settings, select don’t probe (selecting probe may halt your system). You will also be prompted to enter the video memory and the clockchip present in the display. Enter the video memory, and leave the clockchip setting to no clockchip. Next enter the mode you want to run it in. This is where you enter the resolution and color depth. Choose the one your display adapter supports. All these settings are required to run X Windows. If these settings are not correct, you can always reconfigure them after the installation. For this, login and type Xconfigurator (X should be capital). Same prompts for setting your display card and monitor will come up again. You have now completed the basic installation of Linux. Next comes the configuration part. First on the agenda is the network configuration. Linux automatically detects any network cards in your machine. If there’s a PCI Ethernet card, Linux automatically detects it and continues to the TCP/IP configuration. But if there’s an ISA card, you will need to supply a base address to it before proceeding. Commonly used base address is Ox300. In the TCP/IP configuration, you have to specify the IP address, netmask, default gateway, and the primary nameserver. If you are setting up a fresh network, then use the reserved IP address range meant for LANs–192.168.1.x. It makes sense to give this machine the IP address 192.168.1.1. If this is also your primary gateway to the Internet, then set the Gateway address to the same IP address. Then you are prompted to enter the domain name, and the host name. If you have a domain name registered, you can enter that here. For example, we used cmil.com as the domain name, and <computer name>.cmil.com for the host name. There are only a few more steps left. You have to configure the time zone. Choose Asia/Calcutta from the list as that is the only one available for the Indian subcontinent. Linux then prompts you to start the services, and gives you a list of the ones it’s going to start. Leave it to default and continue. Now comes printer configuration. If you have a printer, enter the name of the queue, and the spool directory (leave to default). Select the type of printer from the given list. You will now need to supply the root password. This should be at least six characters long. Finally, it asks you to specify where Linux will boot from. Select master boot record. Linux will reboot and prompt you to enter the username and password. Enter username as root and the password. The next thing to do is apply the updates and patches for the various software in Red Hat Linux. You will find these patches in the pcqupdt directory on the CD-ROM. You will have to mount the CD-ROM to access it from Linux. Ensure that the PCQ CD-ROM is in the drive. To apply the patches, type the following commands:
This will automatically do all the updates and will add all the necessary enhancements. Your basic setup is complete. For further details on what all you can do with this operating system, read on. Red Hat Sources |