Installing Red Hat Linux

• Recommended Hardware

  • 486DX or better
  • 16MB RAM
  • 300MB Hard Drive
  • 2X Spin CDROM Drive
  • Any XFree86 Supported SVGA Video Card
  • 3-button Mouse
  • SCSI Tape Drive ( Optional )
  • UPS ( Optional )

• Create Boot/Root Floppies

  • CDROM:\images\1213\image.txt describes drivers included on the different boot disk images
  • The two root images are CDROM:\images\ramdisk{1,2}.img
  • CDROM:\images\1332 contains experimental 1.3.32 kernels
  • CDROM:\images\2940 contains 1.2.13 kernels patched with support for the Adaptec 2940 PCI SCSI controller
  • From MSDOS the kernel images in the 1332 and 2940 directories look like kernel.img files but they are actually compressed kernel.img.gz files ( MSDOS 6.22 and lower recognize the first period and next three characters as the file extension, everything after that is truncated )
  • From MSDOS use rawrite to copy boot/root disk images to floppies
  • From Linux run /cdrom/images/mkfloppies.pl to create boot/root disks ( only kernels from the 1213 directory can be selected using this script )
  • WorkGroup Solutions provides a MSDOS based character graphics program 'EZINSTALL' which allows interactive selection of kernel images and then walks the user through creating boot/root diskettes
  • Caldera provides a boot disk, requires no root disk and has a unique installation process using LISA ( Linux Installation & System Administration Utility )

• Installation Methods

  • CDROM
  • NFS
  • Local Hard Drive ( text-only install )
  • Floppy Disk ( text-only install )
  • FTP ( text-only install )

• Recommended Disk Configurations

  • given 8MB RAM -> 16-24MB Swap
  • given 16MB RAM -> Swap == RAM
  • 30MB root '/' filesystem
  • 150MB user '/usr' filesystem
    • 350MB for complete installation
    • My software selection required 200MB
  • 200MB source '/usr/src' tree if you plan on having source installed
  • 50MB home '/home' filesystem
  • 50MB local '/usr/local' filesystem
  • Disk usage on my system after installing most of X, TeX, networking, the linux kernel, no games and the majority of the utilities.

    Filesystem         1024-blocks  Used Available Capacity Mounted on
    /dev/sda3              54441    7263    44367     14%   /
    /dev/hda7             117087   65019    46022     59%   /home2
    /dev/sda9              31077    5811    23662     20%   /tmp
    /dev/sda5             349910  199567   132272     60%   /usr
    /dev/sda7              85520    9906    71338     12%   /usr/src
    /dev/sda8              31077    4612    24861     16%   /var
    

• X Installation ( strongly, strongly recommended )

  • Allows for much greater customization
  • If Xconfigurator is unable to configure X, you must use the text installation. After completing installation, you can try using XFree86's xf86config to configure the X Window System

• Rebuild Kernel

  • Always a good idea with any distribution

Last Modified: 17 March 1996