This CD image is bootable so you should be able to pop the CD into the CDROM drive of your PC and start the installation (you may have to check the boot device order in the BIOS of your PC). If you can't boot from your CD, you'll have to create a boot floppy (see below).
boot.img Boot image to install from CD (in case you can't boot from your CD bootnet.img Boot image to install via ftp, NFS or HTTP pcmcia.img Boot image for laptops installing via ftp, NFS, HTTP (and PCMCIA CDROM drives)To make a boot floppy from linux, issue the following command (you will need super user privilege)
dd if=boot.img of=/dev/fd0 bs=1440k
To make a boot floppy from DOS/Windows get hold of rawwrite.exe from ftp://sunsite.doc.ic.ac.uk/packages/linux/redhat/redhat-6.1/i386/dosutils, run it and follow the prompts.
Follow the prompts (they're all pretty simple) TAB switches between options and RETURN selects the highlighted option.
At this point you will be using Disk Druid - which is horrible. Instead of using Disk Druid, I reccomend using fdisk. To use fdisk press CONTROL+ALT+F2. This will give you a console. Now type fdisk /tmp/hda
fdisk is fairly easy to use, but you must understand how PC hard disks are partitioned first.
/tmp/hda1 / Primary Partition /tmp/hda2 swap Primary Partition /tmp/hda3 /scratch Primary Partition /tmp/hda4 Extended Partition /tmp/hda5 /tmp Logical Partition /tmp/hda6 /var Logical Partition /tmp/hda7 /export/data01 Logical Partition /tmp/hda8 /export/data02 Logical PartitionFrom fdisk, type m for a list of commands. Generally, the only commands you need to use are m (help), n (add new partition), d (delete partition), t (change the partition type), p (print the partition table), w (write table to disk and exit). Once you have finished partitioning you must change the partition type of the swap file system to "Linux Swap" which is type 82. To do this use the t option, select partition 2 and set this to 82.
Unfortunately, the images below don't match the partitions above - I used VMware to grab the screen shots - which is limited to a 2 GB file limit - so the images are just to get you familiar with fdisk. Here we see the creation of 3 partitions:
/tmp/hda1 / Primary Partition /tmp/hda2 swap Primary Partition /tmp/hda3 /export/data01 Primary Partition
Now write the table to disk and exit (option w).... and reboot. Go through the above procedures again until you get to the Disk Druid file system configuration screen (again!) and configure the mount points.
LILO is the LInux LOader - here you can specify extra options - usually there are none.
Here we decide on the label for the default kernel - this is what you type at the LILO boot prompt when you boot the computer after installation - if you don'e type anything, the default OS/Kernel will be booted. You can have other operating systems listed here (if others are installed) and other kernels too - sometimes it's useful to have a non SMP (multi CPU) kernel for debugging purposes.
In this example we're going to configure the authentication to use NIS (Network Information System).
If you don't know the amount of memory on your video card, guess. The installer will usually probe the video card and obtain the information later - this is just a fall back in case the probing doesn't work.
I prefer 16 bit colour - you don't really need any more colours - and X11 works faster at this colour depth. Make sure your monitor can handle these resolutions!
The configuration file for X11 is /etc/X11/XF86Config - you can edit this by hand if you have problems and feel up to the task.
Now that installation has finished, you can reboot. When you reboot you should see the following screen:
# device mountpoint filesystemtype options dump fsckorder /dev/hda1 / ext2 defaults 1 1 /dev/hda2 swap swap defaults 0 0 /dev/hda3 /scratch ext2 defaults 1 2 /dev/hda5 /tmp ext2 defaults 1 2 /dev/hda6 /var ext2 defaults 1 2 /dev/hda7 /export/data01 ext2 defaults 1 2 /dev/hda8 /export/data02 ext2 defaults 1 2 /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom iso9660 user,noauto,ro 0 0 /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy vfat user,noauto 0 0 heppcl:/export/department /mnt/linux nfs noauto 0 0 none /proc proc defaults none /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0The only changes to the original fstab are the file system type for the floppy drive (/dev/fd0) and the addition of an NFS mount point (/mnt/linux) which is an exported file system on a NFS server (heppcl) that contains a post installtion script and default configuration files.
Make sure that the mount points (directories) /export/data01, /export/data02 and /mnt/linux exist. If not, create them.
Now mount the NFS file system which was added to /etc/fstab by doing the following:
mount /mnt/linux
The post installation script can now be accessed via /mnt/linux
$ ls -l /mnt/linux/post-install/rh61 total 22 -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 6458 Jan 20 13:52 LAPTOP-RH-QMW.sh* -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 10194 Feb 25 11:41 RH-QMW.sh* drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 1024 Nov 5 11:55 bin/ drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 1024 Nov 4 14:02 config/ drwxr-xr-x 9 root root 1024 Nov 5 14:07 etc/ drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 1024 Nov 5 11:39 misc/ drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 1024 Feb 25 13:46 usr/So
/mnt/linux/RH-QMW.shstarts the post installation. This script was copied from a script originally written by Paul Raines at SLAC. You can view it by clicking here.