6. Install the system

To install the system, you should just continue with the RedHat installation program. The details on how to navigate the installer is outside scope of this document, but a usable reference should be RedHat's own documentation.

You should be at the Installation Method screen. Now: Select the CD-ROM option and press OK. If you have copied the installation files to a local harddisk, (7248-100 owners, that's you) you should of course select the Hard Drive option instead.

At the Installation Path screen, press Install.

At the Installation Class screen, select Custom, and press OK. To select Workstation or Server is a bad idea, as those have premade harddisk partition schemes that don't make any PReP boot partitions, and you won't be able to boot the system without a bootfloppy. If you are installing from a harddisk, you should absolutely not use the premade classes, as those will delete the partition with your downloaded files. Press Custom.

At the Disk Setup screen, select Disk Druid. It's the easiest. If you really don't like it, fdisk is also availble, but you have to use Disk Druid afterwords to mark mount points anyway. To use Disk Druid is not very difficult, and basic usage is beyond scope of this document. If necessary, check the RedHat info.

You should have at least these partitions:
(For the 7248-100 installation, you should allready have made these, so just add mount points for your partitions)

• A boot partition. It should be a primary partition of type PReP boot (type 41) on one of the scsi drives, big enough to hold a compressed Linux kernel image (zImage). Something like 5-10MB should do.
• A swap partition. It can be either a primary or a logical partition on any drive. Any size will do, but a guide may be twice the size of you physical RAM. I have 64MB RAM, so I have a swap partition on 128MB. Remember: This is only a guide.
• A system root partition. It can be either a primary or a logical partition, and it should be big enough to hold the main parts of the installation. You should write down the device (disk and partition number, like sda5, for example) for your system's root partition. You will need it later. The easy way is just to use the rest of the harddisk space for this. If you have several harddisks, big drives or special requirements on safety and other things, you should consider to make own partitions for /home, /usr, /usr/local, and other parts of the system. Details on this is outside the scope of this document, but there is a good discussion on this in the Linux Partition HOWTO.

After this, you should just continue the installation at your own. Refer the RedHat documentation if you're stuck.

Some things to remember, though:

• You should format the swap partition and all your new allocated system partitions.
• If you install from a hard disk, remember to NOT format the partition holding your installation files.

If you have access to a local network, select packages for Networked Workstation. At the Network Configuration screen, the installer will fail on probing for the PCnet 32 kernel module. This is a bug in the installer. The kernel image we're going to use has built-in support for this adapter, so we won't need the kernel module. Just skip this screen (select "No"). We'll make the network configuration manually in chapter 9.

At the X probe, the installer will find a Xpmac thingie. This is a bug in the installer. It won't work. Just press OK. You'll get an error. This is the final installation step, so you can just select "Quit". We'll come back to installing X in chapter 8.