h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Whilst browsing the shelves at a local used bookstore a week ago I saw a copy of 'Linux For Dummies' with Red Hat 7.0 on 3 cd-roms. On a whim I bought it

I'm about halfway through the first reading, and plan to read it prolly twice more before getting to grips with the installation. I must admit that a lot of it is going so far above my head that you'd need the Hubble Space Telescope to get a good view of it

It'll be a while before I can install it anyhow cos my current pc has a measly 4Gb hard drive which is almsot full as it is. I plan to get a second hard drive for Linux, and leave Windoze 98 on the present one, just in case I can't get Linux to work. I'll upgrade the memory at the same time from 64Mb to around 300 (this pc can't take more than 3x128Mb according to Crucial.com). Before I can use two drives though, I have buy a twin IDE cable, cos the one that's in there only has one connector

Long story short - you may be hearing quite a lot from me in the near future Is Red Hat a good distro to start off with?

I would say that it is probably one of the best distro's to start off with.

a lot of the others have non-standard names for packages which means that if you have to go on the net looking for a particular program, then they can be much harder to get working.

they also don't usually patch the kernel much either, so hardware drivers (when available) will usually work straight from the box.

Well done
It's a good place to start out. A good book with a distribution.
A second hard drive is a great idea and more memory is always good - whatever you're running.
As for getting hold of them, try your nearest computer fair or small local store run by enthusiasts.

Have fun

Mmm, not a bad place to start out all told, although perhaps Red Hat's rather dubious choice of compiler for Red Hat 7.0 should be mentioned... but then you may find you want to try other Linux distributions after a while anyway, even if you end up going back to Red Hat.

Thanks for the good words

For the hard drive I reckon I'll go with Pricewatch.com, and maybe ebay for the memory and cable - new sticks of 128Mb are cheaper there than even Crucial.com. There aren't too many parts stores I can get to in this town without a car (strange, considering what a techno-town Austin is )

I'm not keen to install Netscape with Red Hat (it says in the book that it does that as default). Is there a way to avoid that? I guess I could just uninstall it afterwards, although I did that once before, and I've still got bits of it on my harddrive

It's going to be a while before I can afford the new parts, so I'll just keep reading the book until then

Even if Red Hat installs Netscape, you don't have to use it... and you should just be able to uninstall it, as Netscape 4 was a binary-only thing you're not going to find apps which depend on it.

Well now, what was I saying?

If I hadn't missed my bus on the way back from the PO this morning, I wouldn't have walked past that little pc parts shop, and bought myself a 20Gb hard drive and a dual IDE cable for $65 . What I really need though is the memory upgrade - I need to take down a printout of the CPU details before he'll sell me one. That sounds like a conscientious dealer, and someone I'm happy to do business with

Got another question:

According to the book, the bet way to kick off the installation is booting from the cd-rom, and they suggest configuring your BIOS to boot from that first, then the floppy, then the hard drive.

Mine is, but it doesn't boot when I put in the right disc Anyone else had that problem? It'll boot from the floppy with no probs, and you can do it that way, but when I'm confonted with the little blinking cursor, what do I do?

if it will boot from the floppy, then do it that way. I regularly do when doing new installs and distro changes.

I prefer to boot from CD - one of my current objectives is to be able to eliminate the floppy drive from my computer.

Having gone out and bought the new drive, I'm not sure that I'll be able to use it just yet. Ther current pc has a 150W power supply, which I know is pretty meagre - I've not seen a case/PS combo on sale with less than 300W, and I know that insufficient power will cause booting problems.

However, if I can use the cd burner, keyboard, mouse, floppy, monitor, and speakers from this pc, I could build a halfway decent 1.5Gh Athlon box for under $500 with parts from the store where I got the hard drive, and upgrade it when I can afford to

Probably couldn't afford that for another month or two, so I may still have a crack at putting the HD into this one

Right then.

The second hard drive has been installed, partitioned, and formatted, and is working just fine and dandy, and the reason that the pc wouldn't boot from cd-rom no. 1 is that the disks are numbered wrong . I found out quite by accident when I left disc no. 2 (of 3) in the drive when I restarted, and I got a "Begin installation" screen.

I've had a little practice run at the Red Hat installation, and ran across two problems.

Firstly - partitioning. The installation wants to automatically partition the drive, but it can't because there's not enough space, and gives me the option to partition with either fdisk or Disk Druid. I used fdisk to partition the second drive, so that's the one I'm used to.

I'm thinking that the reason why the automatic partitioning failed is that it's trying to partition the C drive (factory installed, master) which is the one I already have Windows and all my data on, which is only 4Gb (no partitions), and which only has about 2Gb of free space. I want to install Linux on the D drive, which is the primary DOS partition on the second physical drive (slave). I partitioned it thusly: Primary partition (D) 4Gb for the OS; 1st logical drive (E) 11Gb for data; 2nd logical drive (F) 5Gb for backup. Do you think I should unpartition the second drive and then partition it during the installation? And what size partitions would you recommend? The book doesn't give any clues aside from saying that a full installation of Red Hat is around 2.5Gb . And if I partition it during installation, does it need to be formatted again? Surely I can't format it with the Linux installation on it...

What do you think about the idea of copying everything from the first drive onto the second? I was thinking of creating a partition of about 1Gb on the second drive for Windows (I believe the Windows98 OS is actually quite small and needs much less than that... anyone know for sure?), then wiping the first drive and using *that* one for Linux. The only trouble with that plan is that the entire drive would be for OS, and any Linux data and files would then be on another physical drive, which I guess might slow things right down. And if I were to do that, what would happen to the pc's boot sector? Would it still be able to find it once it was on the second drive, or could I create a new dual boot sector on the first drive? When I defrag, there are a lot of sectors marked "Data that will not be moved" (the white squares with a little red square in one corner). I'm guessing that the very first one of those is the boot sector.

Secondly, the installation stalled at one point after I'd gone through all the configuration and hit thte "Install now" button. There was a bug report, but the entire pc had frozen up - I couldn't Alt-Shift-Del, so I had to shut it down with the power switch. Hope I haven't got a faulty disc

With me so far?

Okay...

Linux partitions have their own partition type ID. Using disk druid or fdisk from within the Red Hat installer should allow you to sort this out.

Linux doesn't care where you put it, as long as the bootloader is somewhere the BIOS can find it (in the MBR on your Windows partition is usually a good place on a dual-boot Windows/Linux box).

Linux is quite capable of spreading itself across multiple partitions seamlessly. This is because access to disk drives is coordinated by the use of 'mount points'. The first mount point is /, which is the root directory, and the partition mounted on / is called the 'root partition'. There are various standard directories off this - /usr is where most programs and program data go. A lot of people like to mount another partition on /usr to give themselves more program space - personally I don't need to as I have a 25GB root partition. I do highly recommend using a seperate partition mounted as /home, which is where all your data will go, as it's then very easy to preserve it if you reinstall Linux or switch distributions - just set up the /home mount after you've done the install, your data will remain untouched.

You will also need a partition for use as swap - Linux doesn't have the concept of a swapfile like Windows does, it uses a whole partition for it. Red Hat's installer should be able to set that up for you too - a minimum is probably to hit 512MB of RAM + swap, but it varies depending if you're going to do lots of memory stuff or not. On a Gentoo Linux box, 1.5GB RAM+swap is considered ideal, as it helps make sure compiling stuff doesn't go too slow (this is what I have - 1GB swap partition, no wonder I have no disk space left!), but on a Red Hat system where your packages are precompiled that's less of an issue.

However, you should make sure you create one.

Umm... anything else. Oh yes, the installer should be able to format all the partitions you want as well. ext2 is a very safe choice for the filesystem for all except swap (for which you want swapfs). I doubt red hat 7 gives you any other choices - if you get ext3 as a choice, I'd go for that, it recovers from improper shutdowns faster and is a little more focused on data integrity, although it's less well-tested. ReiserFS is also liked by a lot of people for similar reasons, but like ext3 it has disadvantages. I can't see you getting any other choices than that in a distro that old. Most of the new filesystems have only come into use at install time quite recently. I should shut up about that now.

Doesn't the book have a chapter on installing it?

shame on you MaW for the disinformation.

linux does have the idea of a swapfile, and you can use one.

however unlike windows, it was realised almost imediately that it was a crap idea, and the default became to use a swap partition.

some versions of windows can even share a swap partition with linux.

Hey, don't have a fight on my account

Thanks for the response The book does have a lot of information in it, but it seems to leave out some crucial bits like partition size. And I've had another read through the bit about boot loaders and MBRs and LILO, and I think I've found what I needed there

Mrs Gosho is currently getting ready to dish up tonight's dinner, so I'd better not hang around too long, but you can be sure I'll be back later on or tomorrow with more probing questions, oh yes

I wasn't aware Linux could use a swap file - shows how common they are really! Swap partitions work great though. Although I don't use mine all that often these days - I have 512MB of RAM. It's full at the moment, but 270MB of it is disk cache, which can be deallocated instantly when programs need the space.

I do tend to run into swap when I'm compiling really, really big stuff though - or editing enormous images, which is something I try to avoid. At least until I get some more RAM.

So... bearing in mind that I have a 20GB disc on which to install Linux, and that I currently only have 64Mb of RAM, but am planning to take it up to 256, what would you suggest for the number of partitions and size of each?

20Gb should be plenty for me - I'm not a gamer, and I don't download wads of mp3s. The only thing that really takes up any power or memory is when I'm streaming BBC radio

Most unixes I've come across can have both a swap partition and a swap file. Makes a usefull fallback if you're keeping running out of swap space on the disk - create a large swapfile on a normal partition and add it in. You do need to then remember to set up the system to add it in at boot (after mounting the partition it's on of course ).

Gosho,
A very good primer on partitions is the partitions mini howto which can be found at http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/mini/Partition/index.html (and probably on the redhat cd under DOCS or similar not sure where it'll be). This discusses the different partitions and how to set them up.
There is also an install howto at http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Installation-HOWTO/index.html but bear in mind that no significant revisions have been done to either of these documants for a couple of years now (they talk about machines with much smaller RAM/disks than you've got) but the basics remain the same and they're still valid.

and don't forget, if you are using ext2 (or ext3) they have a problem with partitions bigger than about 6Gb. some obsure problem with the data format.

keeping your partitions smaller than this is a fairly good idea anyway, as it makes backing up your data much easier.

swapfiles are usually used when booting thin clients. you boot up, then mount the swapfile over nfs, then get the system fully running, and switch to the local swap partition.