Before Linux Installation
Linux installation (1)
Insert the installation boot diskette into your floppy drive, the RedHat CD to the CDROM, and reboot. If you can boot from the CD, insert the RedHat CD into your CDROM drive and reboot.
You may also start the installation from DOS (or real DOS mode under MS Windows), by running EZSTART.BAT which is on my RedHat CD from Cheapbytes.
Most installers give you an option between text and graphical install. You need to select "text" if your computer memory is restricted. On modern computers, I always use the graphical installer.
It was not for me. It seems that for most newbies, it is fairly straight forward and painless. Depending on your hardware and installation choices, it typically takes 0.5 h to 2.0 hours. [Expect longer or possible problems for slow systems with very restricted memory--it took a whole night to install RH6.0 on my 486-33 MHz with 8 MB memory, the system pausing for 5 minutes at a time appearing to do nothing, yet it installed ok.] Upgrades from previous installations take longer and tend to be more problematic.
However, some newbies reported that the installation was a "total nightmare" to them (hardware problems? lack of experience?). If you encounter problems, my advice would be to install a plain-vanilla system, without struggling with the highest resolution on your fancy video card or other bleeding-edge hardware peripherials which you might have. Anything can be added/configured later, after you get more understanding of how things work on your system. Even a re-install is always an option for a newbie (it seems Linux gurus think it is a shame to ever re-install Linux). It seems that many newbies have problems because they specify too high screen resolutions (which may be not supported or supported only with some extra tune-up). Again, it may not be wise to break your whole installation for support of a single device--the support can be added/tuned-up later.
Linux software comes in "packages". For example, my Linux Mandrake 7.0 installation CD contained 1002 packages. Mandrake 7.2 packs 2 CDs of software--my installation of Mandrake 7.2 put 1123 packages on the hard drive. Mind you, this is not all the software available for Linux--just a selection made by people who put the Mandrake distribution together. Mandrake tends to pack more software than RedHat. An entire application (“program”) may be contained in one or several packages (libraries and add-ons tend to be in separate packages).
No matter what distribution or version, the CD contains packages that make the base operating system (kernel, libraries, a selection of command-line configuration and maintenance tools, etc) a rich selection of networking "clients" and servers" with appropriate configuration and monitoring tools, some end-user text mode applications, base X-windowing system, at least one GUI desktop (most likely several), and likely a slew of GUI applications.
The installation program (either RedHat or Mandrake) will ask you what type of installation to perform. If you select "workstation installation", then the packages normally found on servers will be omitted from your installation (for example, the Apache web server may be skipped). If you choose "server installation", then typically the end-user desktop applications will not be installed (for example, the GIMP graphical utility may be omitted). You can also choose to install "everything", and this is my favorite option for a home computer installation. Finally, you may opt to make your own selection of packages to install--read on.
It is definitely a very bad idea to hand-pick packages/programs on the basis of how interesting their names sound--some packages have rather unusual names and I would never guess what they do. You could cripple your system by omitting the installation of an essential package (e.g., a critical library). You might also be disappointed when insisting to run some cool-named, cutting-edge piece of software ("version 0.1") that happened to be included on the distribution CD. In general, you might be annoyed by the functionality (or lack of it) that your "customized Linux" exhibits. Being a newbie, it sometimes pays to trust the defaults selected by your distribution creator.
Therefore, for my final "production" installation, I would stay away from the tempting installation option "expert install--select packages manually" unless I wish to install everything anyway. For starters, I like the safe "max default installation", however this installation option is called on your CD. Again, you can run into problems if you start with Linux using a strangely customized system (many installers will let you customize at will).[thanks networkdictionary]
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