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