[techtalk] 1st Linux install

Malcolm Tredinnick malcolm at commsecure.com.au
Mon May 8 07:48:16 EST 2000


On Sun, May 07, 2000 at 10:11:23AM -0700, Clair Mooza wrote:
> Hi, I am very  new to this message board and also to Linux.  What a great
> find this site and these message boards are!!  I have used Linux (Slackware
> and HP) a little bit at school, but not yet at home.  I want to install
> Linux on my computer at home (Red Hat 5.2), but don't really know the best
> way to do it.  I have four partitions on my hard drive.  Three of them are
> 2.0 GB and the other is just a really small 8-10MB or something equally as
> useless.  I have Windows 98 OS on the first partition, applications for 98
> on the second partition, and NT server 4.0 on third partition (which I am
> eager to get rid of!).  What would be the best way to get this install
> going?  I was thinking Partition Magic and then formatting the third
> partition to a Linux file system might be a good way, any other ideas?  If
> Partition Magic would be good, what next?  No advice would be insulting!
> Okay, well maybe to turn on/off computer...  : )  Thank you very much in
> advance.

Having never used Partition Magic (in fact, I'm barely able to spell it), I
won't comment on that option, but the theory sounds fine. You can probably
even just use the partioner that comes with Red Hat (Disk Druid) and blow away
(a.k.a delete) the NT partition as part of the process. Unfortunately, there
are two other problems to consider here:

(1) You will need to have a swap partition somewhere; this will carve space
out of one or more of your other partitions. Note that this is a completely
seperate partition (and filesystem type) under Linux, whereas Windows just
uses part of the partitions it already has. As a general rule of thumb,
reserve as much space for swap as you have RAM (and it doesn't hurt to
reserve more -- although if you need that much swap, your performance will be
degraded and buying more RAM would be good).

(2) Assuming you didn't make a typo above and really are installing Red Hat
5.2, then you will need a small partition that lies below the 1024th cylinder
on your harddrive for booting (this may not be true if you have a very new
BIOS -- maybe others can provide more details about that). I'm guessing that
the small (10M) partition you mentioned above lies at the end of the drive and
was just space left over from assigning the other partitions. If you are lucky
and it lies at the beginning, great! Otherwise, more partitioning may be
needed. :-( But wait .. there's more ...

The good news is: if you install Red Hat 6.2 (not 5.2), it comes with the
latest version of LILO (the linux boot loader) and providing you BIOS is
post-1998 (according to LILO's readmes) *or* you have a certain type of
harddrive (see ftp://sd.dynhost.com/pub/linux/lilo/lilo-21.4.3.announce.txt
for the types), you can boot from anywhere on a disk up to 2 terabytes in
size.

Hope this helps,
Malcolm

-- 
Malcolm Tredinnick            email: malcolm at commsecure.com.au
CommSecure Pty Ltd





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