6 Continuing the install (FTP, CD, or NFS)

Place your boot disk in drive A (yes, you must have a 3.5" High Density drive as your A drive) and reboot your machine. You will see a screen of information pertaining to LILO parameters. If you know you need parameters to force the kernel to see certain hardware devices, enter them now. Otherwise, just hit enter to auto probe.

Watch the messages as the system boots and see if all your hardware is detected. For example, if you have SCSI in your system and you see a message like "scsi: 0 hosts", you have a problem. Make sure you picked the right boot image first, and then try entering command line parameters. For more info on those, see the RedHat-FAQ (available at any Red Hat mirror). If everything goes well, insert the root disk when prompted.

One of the first things you have to do is mount your install media. If you are doing an FTP install, you will have to do some oddities here. If you are doing an NFS install, you will need to setup your server properly and then mount it. If you need help with this, you will need to email support@redhat.com right now (we hope to add more on NFS installs soon).

For an FTP install, pick the CDROM type install (instead of NFS). It will try and mount a CD and return an error that it couldn't mount. Just hit enter to continue. It will then ask you what you want to do. Highlight "Enter Device Name" and hit enter. Enter the partition name of the partition you placed the install media on and hit enter. Now enter the file system type you place there (most likely ext2) and hit enter. If you told it everything correctly, you should have a mount.

For a CD install, the process is much simpler. Just pick CD, and it should mount your CD.

The next step is to partition your disks. One thing to remember: Do not try and partition over the partition you have your install media on if you are doing the FTP install!!!

First and foremost, don't delete any partitions that contain data that you need (like your DOS or OS/2 partitions). You will most likely want to just make new partitions for Linux in your available space.

Use cfdisk to partition your disks if you can (it may give fatal errors in some cases where fdisk will work fine, especially when dealing with brand-new SCSI disks).

We recommend a configuration like so: (it is a good idea to write down which partitions are which)

• If you have 8M of RAM, make a 16-24M swap partition (depending on how much you plan to do with linux at one time). If you have 16M or more of RAM, just make as much swap as you have RAM.
• Make a 30M '/' partition
• Make a 150M (or more depending on how much you want to install) '/usr' partition. If you plan to install everything, this should be more like 350M.
• If you plan to install alot of the source (which is not required), you may want to make a '/usr/src' partition as well of about 200M.
• Make a 50M or so '/home' partition. This is where all user's home directories go, so you are completely at your own discretion on size for this one (although 50M is a good number for a single user system, 200M may be too much for a 4 user system).

You should have made a swap partition (and tagged it as such) above. This step will probably just find it and use it. If not, you made a mistake and need to go back to the partitioning step. You most likely forgot to mark your swap partition as type 82.

This section allows you to select which file systems you want to format to use with your new system. Do not select any file systems here that you have data on that you don't want to lose. Use the space-bar to select all the partitions that you made for this install and then hit enter.

This step is very important. You need to at least add one partition and mount it on '/'. You should also add all your other partitions that you made from the "Partitioning" step above. Just keep doing an 'Add a new partition' until you have them all listed. If you followed the suggestions above, you should end up with a list of file systems like:

/dev/hda1  ext2  30000  /
/dev/hda2  ext2  50000  /home
/dev/hda3  ext2 150000  /usr
etc.

Now, if you are doing an FTP install, you will only have 3 series to select from. Pick them all (by pressing space-bar on each of them) and hit enter. If you are doing a CD or NFS install, pick the series that you want. You do not have to pick everything, and you can install anything you left out later using lim or rpp-install.

From here, everything should go fine, with a few exceptions for FTP users. Those people must:

• Skip the "Install X server" step
• Skip the "Configure X" step
• Skip this step and continue in order.