Chapter Summary

Most installations of Red Hat Linux begin by booting from the first installation CD or the installation DVD. When the system boots from the CD or DVD, it displays a boot: prompt. You can respond to this prompt by entering a variety of commands, by pressing RETURN without entering a command, or by not doing anything. In all cases, the system boots Red Hat Linux from the CD. If you are installing from files on the local hard disk or over a network, give the command linux askmethod in response to the boot: prompt.

The program that installs Red Hat Linux is named Anaconda. Anaconda identifies the hardware, builds the filesystems, and installs or upgrades the Red Hat Linux operating system. Anaconda can run in textual or graphical (default) interactive mode or in batch mode (Kickstart). Anaconda does not write to the hard disk until it displays the Begin Installation screen. Until it displays this screen, you can press CONTROL-ALT-DEL to abort the installation without making any changes to the hard disk.

The Disk Druid graphical disk-partitioning program can add, delete, and modify partitions and logical volumes (LVs) on a hard disk during installation. The parted utility reports on and manipulates hard disk partitions before or after installation. The system-config-lvm utility works with LVs after installation.

A dual-boot system can boot one of two operating systems, frequently Windows and Linux. The biggest problem in setting up a dual-boot system, assuming you want to add Linux to a Windows system, is finding enough disk space for Linux.

Fedora Core 5 uses the X.org X Window System version X11R7.0. Under X.org, the primary configuration file is named /etc/X11/xorg.conf.

Red Hat Linux uses the GNOME display manager (gdm) to provide a graphical login, even if you are using a KDE desktop. The gdmsetup utility configures the login presented by gdm by editing the /etc/gdm/custom.conf (FEDORA) or /etc/X11/gdm/gdm.conf (RHEL) file.