Learn Unix Administration Blog

2. Linux flashes into graphics mode, enabling your mouse, and the next screen you see lets you choose what language to use for the installation process. You'll probably choose English, in which case you can just click on the Next button on the bottom right.

The next step, as illustrated in Figure 1.2, is to pick your keyboard configuration. Most likely, you can again select the default values and proceed to the next step.

Figure 1.2: Keyboard configuration.

The mouse configuration is the third preinstallation step (these steps are just configuring anaconda, the installation application), and I've always had good results with the default 3 Button Mouse (PS/2).

3. Now we're ready for the actually installation process to begin. The first selection -- and perhaps the most important selection -- is to decide what kind of installation you'd like. The choices are Workstation, Server, Laptop and Custom.

I recommend a workstation installation if you have sufficient disk space (about 2GB), because it's easier to install software and then not use it than to want to use it and find it wasn't installed. The server installation skips all the X Window System software packages, though you can add it back by going to the package groupings area.

4. The first major task during the installation process is to decide how you want to slice up your available disk space so that Linux can properly utilize it. In almost all cases, your best bet is to have the system figure out how much space you have and then partition it automatically. You can choose this with Have The Installer Automatically Partition For You.

You'll probably see a dialog box similar to Figure 1.4. Don't panic. Remember, you've already done a complete backup, and we're planning on replacing the current OS on the computer with Linux.

Figure 1.4: You need to confirm that you want to create new partitions.

Next, choose Remove All Partitions On This System, unless you already had a previous Linux installed and want to use that existing partition space. Make sure that if you have multiple drives, it has picked the correct drive for the install we're about to start!

The system automatically creates a reasonable partition strategy. For my system, with a 15GB disk available, it split it into /dev/hda1 (to mount as /boot) with 47MB of disk space, /dev/hda3 (to mount as swap space) with 188MB of space, and the remaining 15.1GB as /dev/hda2 (mounting as /).

Rather than accept this, I am going to split /dev/hda2 into two partitions, one that's 4.1GB and one that's 11GB. The latter will prove useful later on this web site, when we explore disk formatting and the mount command. To accomplish this task, I select the partition in question and click Edit. This produces the dialog box shown in Figure 1.5. Notice that I've already specified a fixed size of 4100MB here.

Figure 1.5: Repartitioning to grab some space.

Once accepted (click OK), you'll now have a free space listed at 11029MB. Click on that, click Edit, and you can specify a mount point if you'd like. Or, leave it as free space and you can perhaps install Windows within and create a dual-boot configuration (see "Multiple Boot Configurations" in Hour 11).

5. Now you need to pick a boot loader, if any. I prefer grub, but you might like lilo. I will say that there's really no reason not to pick one of these, just so you have flexibility in your configuration later on. Otherwise, leave all these options alone. If you'd like, you can specify a grub password, which will mean that every time the system is rebooted, the password will be required to proceed with the boot process. Be thoughtful about this option: If you specify this and then have your system in a collocation rack, who will enter the password if it reboots?

The next step is to configure your network interface, as shown in Figure 1.6. If you have DHCP, you're in luck. Click that box and you're done! Otherwise, you'll want to fill out as much of the information specified as possible.

Figure 1.6: Configuring your network connection.

Almost done with the configuration questions. The last network configuration step is to pick a firewall configuration for security. Though the default is to customize your settings, I tend to select Use Default Firewall Rules and leave a security level of Medium.

6. If you want to make your system usable in multiple languages, you can specify them in the Additional Language Support screen that comes next. Even if you only want English (USA), spend a moment to scroll through this list and see just how many different choices there are. Quite impressive!

There are lots of languages listed, but it's worth highlighting that it's up to the individual application to support the language, so don't be surprised if you install Italian, just to find some richiami del sistema in inglese.

Your time zone should be specified next, and you can click on cities on the world map, select a regional map from the pull-down menu, or scroll until you find a city in your own time zone to select from the list. Living in the Mountain Time zone, I select Denver, Colorado from the list.

The next screen is the Account Configuration screen. You don't need to create a number of accounts at this juncture, but if you know multiple people will be using the system, this is a very convenient place to add them. In Figure 1.7 you can see that I've created four user accounts, and also set the root password.

As a reminder: you must set a root password here, and it must be something that's simultaneously complex enough that it would be difficult for crackers to guess and simple enough that you'll remember it. Don't forget what you specify here, it'll be critical to the long-term health of your Unix system down the road.

Figure 1.7: Account Configuration screen.

7. Finally, we are at the point where we need to select which packages we'd like to install. There are default packages already selected because of our workstation installation specification earlier, but additional material can be added too.

As Figure 1.8 shows, I recommend installing KDE in addition to Gnome and the Software Development Tools. Whether you want to include games is up to you. :)

Notice in particular on the lower right corner the indicator of how big all the combined packages will be (here it's 1,559MB, just about 1.6GB).

Figure 1.8: Selecting additional packages to install.

It's just about time to go and get a cup of tea and read the paper while anaconda slowly installs each of the hundreds of packages you've now selected.

8. The only task left is to configure the screen for X Windows (which might seem a little weird, since we've already been working in a graphical environment with a mouse, but that's another story). Fortunately, I've found that anaconda does a very good job of analyzing hardware configurations, and just about always picks the best setup to match your physical system.

At this point in the installation process, you can still back out, shut down your computer, eject the CD-ROM, and have your system just as it was prior to booting into the Red Hat world. Once we proceed beyond this, however, all the prior contents of the disk will be destroyed. Please, please ensure you have a good backup before going further!

Enough paranoia, let's install this baby! The next screen shows you the progress of the installation process, as anaconda formats the file systems, transfers an install image (the ISO images we discussed earlier in this hour) to the disk, and then begins the actual transfer. Pay particular attention to the Total and Remaining package counts — they'll give you a very good idea of how much time you have left on the install.

Expect this step to take at least an hour, and possibly quite a bit longer, depending on how fast your system, CD-ROM and disk are. Figure 1.9 shows how the installation looks just a little ways into the process (about 10 minutes).

Figure 1.9: Installing packages, slowly, but surely!

Once this process is done, you'll get a peppy Finished! screen and you can reboot and run your new Red Hat Linux installation on your computer. Congratulations!

The question of what to do after you've installed your system is, of course, the topic of the rest of this web site. But one thing you might try is just logging in as a regular user, selecting either Gnome or KDE as your desktop environment, then launching a Web browser and surfing the Web. See how it is similar in some ways, and quite different in other ways, to Windows or Macintosh systems.

Tags: Installing Unix