Certification Summary

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The Linux installation is extremely flexible. You can troubleshoot the installation process with several different consoles. Some provide useful messages; one console provides a bash shell prompt where you can inspect the current detailed status of the installation.

After Linux is installed, you can find out what happened. The /var/log/dmesg file helps you figure out what hardware was detected. The /root/install.log file lists the packages that were installed.

The default boot loader is GRUB. The GRUB configuration file, /etc/grub.conf, is highly customizable. You can use it to boot multiple operating systems. You can add commands to the boot sequence. You can customize GRUB to test different configurations. Red Hat is moving away from LILO as an alternative boot loader.

It's most efficient to configure partitions with Disk Druid during the installation process. However, if you forget something, you can use fdisk to help configure the partitions, RAID arrays, and LVM groups that you need on the exam and on production computers.

You can set up RAID level devices to mirror and stripe your drives. RAID levels 1 and 0 require that you have two or more drives, while RAID 4 and 5 require three or more. You can also set up linear mode to combine multiple physical hard disks into a single volume.

You can set up LVM groups to increase your flexibility. LVM allows you to set up partitions with the sizes you need and readjust them at will. While it's best to configure LVM groups using the graphical version of Disk Druid, you can do so with appropriately configured partitions and commands.

You can automate your entire installation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux with the Kickstart system. You have two ways to set up the Kickstart configuration file: from the anaconda-ks.cfg file based on your local installation or through the GUI Kickstart Configurator. In this way, you can automate the installation of Linux from a local source such as a CD-ROM, or through an NFS or HTTP network connection.

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