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Project: Linux  Howtos
Red Hat 7 installation guide
By Ramnath Shenoy <ramnath@freeos.com>
Posted: ( 2000-12-14 11:12:19 EST by )
Red Hat has the reputation of catering to geeks but looking at the
installation, you might think otherwise. For experienced users it's a
piece of cake. For new users or those who have had problems during
the installation, we have this detailed install guide.
Installing Red Hat 7.0 is a breeze. Unlike the previous version, which
promised support for the i810 chip but gave up when it came to the crunch,
RH 7.0 has come a long way in hardware auto detection. In fact, we hardly
had to make any manual selections with the exception of Time zone,
programs to install and the like. At last, Red Hat seems to have woken up
to the needs of the average user. Pre-Install checklist You would need the following survival equipment 1. Manuals for your computer monitor. If you do not have them, then try
the manufacturer's web site or try chasing the supplier.
2. A notebook to keep a log of the selections you have made (so you can
undo any mistakes)
3. A prayer book? Pre-Install tasks 1. BIOS boot settings: Ensure your boot sequence reads CDROM/C/A.
2. Partition your hard disk using fdisk or a program like Partition Magic.
Unless you are confident, we highly recommend using Partition Magic. You
will need at least one partition for installing Red hat Linux. The size
should be at least 2GB with the ext2 format. Windows uses vfat format.
Installation
Insert Disk 1 in the CD--drive and boot the machine. You
will see a welcome screen and a series of startup messages.
Anaconda, the Red Hat installation tool is starting up. The next screen gives you a choice of install modes: Press enter to start the graphical installation, Text to start the
installation in text mode. Expert mode is for the more advanced users and
there is a rescue mode if you need to fix a previous installation. The
default is graphical and is recommended unless you have an unknown video
card. Once the selection is made, Anaconda probes your card and monitor.
This is the crucial part and it is time to bring out that prayer book. If
successful you should shortly see an X and a two-part screen, otherwise
it will either revert to Text mode install or worse -- shut down the
installation with a series of error messages. This could happen when you
are using an unsupported graphics card. The next two steps are routine, select a language. The default is
English(US). Next, select the type of keyboard and mouse. Your mouse
should have been detected already but most of the time the installation
uses a generic mouse setup. You might want to change the mouse type to
your own from the list. Once this is done, the next screen gives a choice
of installation: Workstation -- Recommended for a newbie
Server -- Erases all other partitions on the disk
Custom -- For the geeks!
Upgrade Make a selection based on your requirements. For a clean install with
everything, you should go in for the workstation. The server installation
will only install the bare minimum server applications and tools. Don't
choose this if you want the GUI because it doesn't install that. You will
be forced to install all that manually. Another option here is to upgrade
from a old installation. This option worked quite well when we tried a few
upgrades. Here we chose the workstation installation. The next screen gives a choice of partitioning the Hard disk. Auto partition -- recommended, but requires partitions to be created before hand
Manual using disk druid
Manual using fdisk You could do a manual partition using Disk Druid, the GUI partitioning
or you could use fdisk, which is a text based tool but not very easy to
use. Disk Druid is fairly easy to use but the Linux partitioning scheme
could be a bit confusing for newbies. Linux refers to your IDE devices
like hard drives and CD-ROM drives as hda, hdb etc where hda will
represent the master devices on the primary IDE, hdb will represent the
slave device on the primary ide and so on. Then each device will be
divided into hda1, hda2. These are the partitions on your device. Hda1 is
the primary partition on your first drive. Primary partitions can go up to
number 4 and beyond that you have the logical partitions represented by
hda5, hda6. Partitions can be created if you have free space. If not then
delete the partitions that you don't require and create new partitions in
the free space created. For a default workstation installation you should have at least a 600-700
MB partition. Add another 128 MB for a swap partition, which you will need if
you are going to be using the GUI extensively. So make sure you have about
800 MB free on your hard drive. In case you have already pre-partitioned the hard disk, select auto
partition. What happens is that Anaconda recognizes the ext2 partition you
have already created and installs a swap partition and a root partition on
this space. If not then we recommend disk druid. Network configuration You need to contact your system administrator for
the following information: IP address
Hostname
Primary DNS If you are not on a network, then you can skip this section and go
directly to the next which is Time Zone selection. Just point to your
location on the map and your zone will show up in the box. Root Password and Adding Users At this point, you will be asked to give a root password and add at least one user.
The password should be a minimum of 6 characters. The root account is the
administrator account for your system and is
the most powerful account. You should be very careful while using this account.
That is why it is recommended that you also
create a normal user account. This user account will allow you to do just
about everything so the only time you should have to login as root will be
when you need to change some system configuration. At all
other times use the non-privileged user account. You can skip the user
account creation but it is not recommended. Package Selection
Workstation selectors get a choice of Gnome, KDE, Games
and Custom. We selected Gnome+KDE which was a total of 475 packages and
about 990 MB in our case. If you select custom here, then you can further
narrow down your choice of packages to be installed. You could however run
into dependency problems. Certain programs need others to be installed
before them or they would not be installed. The problem comes in locating
and ensuring their installation as they may need others to be
pre-installed and so on! Why Gnome as well as KDE? Well, Linux is all about choice, isn't it?
GNOME and KDE are both excellent GUIs and you can't go wrong with either.
GNOME is flashier but KDE feels better. If undecided then feel free to
select both. Monitor and Video card Configuration The next step is configuring your monitor. Beware, a wrong selection at
this point could end up damaging your monitor! Fortunately, Red Hat 7.0
seems to have a long list of known monitors and yours should get auto
detected or be on that list. If not, then you will need to refer to your
monitor manual for vertical and horizontal refresh rates. Video Card: This should get auto detected. You should test your selection
at this point. Use graphical logon
Customize X logon We recommend you select both of these unless you are one of those terminal
fans. The customize logon feature allows you to select Gnome or KDE to
start every time and as per each user.
You can now sit back and relax as RH 7.0 gets installed. This should take
about 20 minutes or so depending upon your machine and selection. At the
end of the installation, the machine boots and ejects the CD. Post Installation We recommend some post installation tasks to fine-tune your machine. 1. Optimizing the hard disk: The default setting of support for 16-bit
EIDE is on. However, modern hard disks are capable of 32-bit I/O. To check
the options start a terminal and give the following command: hdparm /dev/hd* (a,b or c- this depends on your configuration. Try 'a' first)
You will see something like this:
mulcount = 0 (off)
I/O support = 0 (default 16-bit)
unmaskirq = 0 (off)
using_dma = 0 (off)
keepsettings = 0 (off)
nowerr = 0 (off)
readonly = 0 (off)
readahead = 8 (on)
geometry = 1240/255/63, sectors = 199311844, start = 0 hdparm -Tt /dev/hda gives buffered and unbuffered performance figures for
your hard disk-IDE controller combination.
hdparm -c1 /dev/hda will set the disk to use 32-bit I/O
hdparm -d1 /dev/hda enables DMA Test the performance by giving the command
hdparm -Tt /dev/hda You should definitely see an improvement in performance. To keep the settings, type
hdparm -k1 /dev/hda 2. Trimming Startup programs: To know which programs are starting up by
default open a terminal and type su - to logon as root. Type setup and select system services. You will see a list of programs. Some will be marked with an asterisk.
These are started up at boot. Add, remove as per your choice. 3. Accessing the Windows partition and files: You need not say good bye to
all those files saved in your Windows partition. Note, we assume your
Windows partition is hda1 Start any text editor and open the file /etc/fstab Add the following to a new line /dev/hda1 /mnt/windows vfat defaults 0 0 Here we've assumed that Windows is installed on the first primary partition of
your drive. Replace /dev/hda1 here with the partition where your Windows
installation resides. /mnt/windows is the mount point for your Windows
partition. This should point to the directory under which your Windows
partition will be accessible. Vfat is the filesystem that is being mounted. Save the file and exit the editor. Now mount the partition by typing mount
/mnt/windows. It will be automatically mounted the next time you boot into
Linux. You can now access your Windows partition and all your files.
Congratulations! You now have a working installation of red Hat 7.0 Ramnath is an engineer and webmaster for www.xage.org. You can contact him
at ramnath@xage.org
Other articles by Ramnath Shenoy
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