Before You Begin the Installation

Part of the process of installing Fedora (or any operating system for that matter) is to research how well the new operating system will fit into an existing hardware environment, or if new hardware will be required to host the operating system. The following sections provide some basic points to consider when installing Fedora and augment the checklists and ideas presented in Chapter 2, "Preparing to Install Fedora."

You start by researching and documenting your hardware. This information will prove helpful later on during the installation.

Research Your Hardware Specifications

You should first have a basic understanding of your system's hardware, such as the type of mouse, keyboard, or monitor, the amount of installed system memory, and the size of the hard drive. You need to know the storage capacity of your hard drive in order to choose a partitioning scheme, for example. Knowing the difference between a PS/2 and USB mouse will ensure proper pointer configuration something that Fedora should do for you, but there is no harm being prepared. Such information will help make the installation as trouble-free as possible.

Use the checklist shown in Table 2.2 in Chapter 2 to inventory or at least record some basic features of your system. Some items you will need to know include the amount of installed memory, size of your hard drive, type of mouse, capabilities of the display monitor (such as maximum resolution), and number of installed network interfaces (if any).

Choose an Installation Type

You should also know what type of installation you plan to do beforehand (such as a workstation, server, firewall, gateway, router, development system, and so on). The type of install, or rather, the purpose of your intended install, will dictate the type and amount of software installed, and also influence hard drive storage requirements.

For convenience, the Fedora installer offers quick presets for a personal desktop, workstation, and server installation. Each type will install a set of preselected software libraries and applications. Use the custom installation option to select individual software packages and fine-tune your software selection. See Chapter 2 for details and hardware requirements for these installs.

NOTE

Although you can support nearly any operation (such as a development workstation or server) by installing all the software included with this book's CD-ROMs and DVD, this approach generally is not a good idea unless you are testing new hardware or learning how to use Linux at home. The reason for this is that installing extraneous software not relevant to support specific operations, especially in a business or production environment, can introduce security risks.

Choose Software Installation Options

Most new users with standalone Linux workstations will install all the software included with Fedora and depend on Red Hat's RPM technology (using up2date) or Fedora's support of yum to sort out and handle software dependencies (see Chapter 7, "Managing Software and System Resources," for more details about using these programs). Although Fedora is very stable and robust, crafting an efficient, stable, and working system can sometimes require consideration about the type of software to use given your existing hardware. For example, don't expect to run a fully loaded multimedia workstation if you plan to use Fedora Core on an early Pentium-based PC. However, that same PC can easily support email, print, or FTP server operations and even perform light duty as an intranet documentation web server.

Planning Partition Strategies

Part of planning a custom system involves implementing a partitioning strategy based on how you plan to use Fedora and, as previously mentioned, the capabilities of your existing hardware. For example, if you plan to host thousands of images or audio files, how much storage will you need? If you plan to back up this collection, will you use a tape drive, burn copies of directories onto optical media, transfer files across a network, or will you simply copy the files to another hard drive?

If you are planning an installation for a corporate or environment, you must also consider future expansion of the system. You will want to craft a flexible system that can evolve with your business and its system needs.

Knowing how software is allocated on your hard drive for Linux involves knowing how Fedora organizes its filesystem, or layout of directories on storage media. This knowledge will help you make the most out of hard drive space; and in some instances, such as planning to have user directories mounted via NFS or other means, can help head off data loss, increase security, and accommodate future needs. Create a great system, and you'll be the hero of information services.

To plan the best partitioning scheme, research and know the answers to these questions:

• How much disk space does your system require?

• Do you expect your disk space needs to grow significantly in the future?

• Will the system boot just Fedora, or do you need a dual-boot system?

• How much data will require backup, and what backup system will work best? (See Chapter 16, "Backing Up, Restoring, and Recovery," for more information on backing up your system.)

CD-ROM Installation Jumpstart

To install Fedora from the CDs or DVD included with this book, you must have at least a Pentium-class CPU, 800MB hard drive, and 64MB RAM. You will need at least 128MB to install using Fedora's graphical installer. A 10GB hard drive can easily host the entire distribution, leaving about 3GB free for other data. That said, hard disks are so cheap now that it costs almost the same to get an 80GB drive as it is to get a 20GB even 250GB drives are affordable.

To begin the installation, set your PC's BIOS to boot from CD-ROM. Next, insert the first CD-ROM and boot your computer. Press Enter at the first screen and follow through the subsequent dialogs to install.

Remember or write down your system's root password. Also, even if you thoroughly test configuration of a graphical desktop during installation, you can choose to have Fedora boot to a text-based login (see the section "Step-by-Step Installation" later in this chapter). You can then start a graphical session after you finish the install, reboot, and log in. You can always set Fedora to boot to a graphical login later (see Chapter 6, "The X Window System," to see how).

If you have a floppy drive, create a boot disk during the install (see the "Step-by-Step Installation" section). Finally, finish the install, remove the CD-ROM from your computer, and reboot. Then log in and enjoy Fedora!

The Boot Loader

You will need to decide how to boot your system. For example, you can boot Fedora from a hard drive or floppy disk using the default boot loader, the Grand Unified Boot Loader (known as GRUB), use a commercial boot loader (as discussed in Chapter 2), or choose to not use a boot loader at all. Not using a boot loader can make booting Fedora difficult, but not impossible. For example, you can use another operating system such as DOS to jump-start to a Fedora session.

A boot loader is most often installed in the Master Boot Record (MBR) of an IDE hard drive, but can also be installed in the root Linux partition, or on a floppy disk. The boot loader can be used to pass essential kernel arguments to the Linux kernel for use during the boot process. Some arguments might include special disk geometry settings or specifying additional network interfaces. Fedora's boot loader, GRUB, supports special operations, such as booting from read-only memory (ROM) or flashed memory chips containing boot-loading code. Using a bootloader from floppy disk will work with many PCs, but you should be aware that not all PC hardware BIOS supports booting via Universal Serial Bus (USB) removable media or from a floppy disk. In fact, many PCs no longer include a floppy disk drive!

The GRUB loader works with all BSD Unix variants and many proprietary operating systems. This utility also supports menuing, command lines, installed RAM detection, and diskless and remote network booting. GRUB also offers password protection.

NOTE

Fedora's mkbootdisk command can be used to create floppy and CD-ROM boot media while using Linux. To do so, use the Linux kernel release number (returned by using the uname -r command) and a specified device. For example, to create a boot floppy, use the command like this:

 # mkbootdisk --device /dev/fd0 `uname -r` 

To create a CD-ROM boot image (which must then be burned onto a CD-R or CD-RW blank), use the command with its -iso option like this:

 # mkbootdisk --iso --device boot_cd.img `uname -r`  

Fedora can also be booted from a DOS session using the LOADLIN program, a DOS PATH to the Linux kernel, and the location of Linux kernel, such as

 LOADLIN c:\KERNEL\VMLINUZ root=/dev/hda2 ro 

In this example, the kernel named VMLINUZ is loaded, and the second primary partition of the first IDE hard drive is specified at the root (/) partition of a Linux system.

NOTE

If you find that LOADLIN fails to boot Linux and complains about a large kernel size, you can either try using make bzimage to build a smaller kernel or rebuild a kernel that relies less on built-in features and more on loadable modules. See Chapter 38, "Kernel and Module Management," for more information.

When choosing a commercial boot loader, weigh its capabilities and options. A good boot loader will support multiple operating systems, the ability to boot different Linux kernels (in order to change the characteristics of a system or easily accommodate new hardware), password protection, custom boot displays, and sane defaults, such as requiring verification before overwriting existing configurations and accommodating other recognized filesystems or previously installed boot code.

If you run into trouble after installing Fedora Core, make sure to read the documentation for your boot loader to acquire any diagnostic information. Most boot loaders will report on any problems, and the solution might be commonly fixed. Your best (and least expensive) bet is to use GRUB because it is the default boot loader for Fedora Core.