Installation Process

You have obtained a Linux distribution and don't you know what to do next. Or, you have realized that Linux neither have a setup.exe nor install.exe like windoze has. Maybe you have looked around in the directories and only could find an .exe file called rawrite.exe? Hmmm, I can hear you saying, it shouldn't be so hard!...

Although installation process differs from one distribution to another in some ways, the main aspects are all the same. In this page, I will both try to explain how some commonly used distributions' installation process differ from one to another and what the main installation steps take place on a typical Windoze95 or MS-DOS operated x86 compatible machine.

At this point I should say that this page is only a short reference about the subject. For more information please refer to the HOWTO's or the install.txt file included in your distribution.

• Collecting information about your hardware.
  
  You'll need some information on the machine you're dealing with. Maybe some people say Unix compatibles (Linux is one of them) is rather difficult than other operating systems because of this. Especially you might need to know on which IO and IRQ's your sound card is, which chipset does your VGA card has, the type of your CPU (486,PPro etc...), how much VGA memory do you have, which com port are you using for mouse, modem.
• Making installation floppies.
  
  Somewhere in your Linux distribution there should be directories like bootdsks.144 and rootdsks.144. The names needn't be exactly the same but should sense like it. It may only require to have a boot disk or may require to have more than 2 disks. You may create boot disks on a clearly DOS formatted floppy with the utility called Rawrite.exe. You would probably find it somewhere in your distribution. Read the readme.txt files and find out which files are bootdisks and which files are rootdisks.
• Booting Your System
  
  Boot your system while the bootdisk is in and when it is asked insert the rootdisk.
• Repartitioning and Formatting Your Hard Drive
  
  Run the specialized fdisk program that your distribution has and repartition your hard drive. At least 100mb for / (root partition), 700mb for /usr/, 10-20mb swap partition would be more than enough for a fully integrated webserver, ftpserver, multimedia box or whatever you think.By the way, you needn't delete previously installed operating systems as long as they exist on other partitons.By the way, on Unix compatible systems there is no drive letter like C:\ or A:\. Instead, we use /dev/hda1 as the first partition on first hard drive.
• Selecting the packages to install
  
  Because there are hundreds of packages which come free with the distributions, hardest part for me to explain is this. Although I won't tell which are the most required which are less, I could only say that if you have partitioned your hard drive as I said in Repartitoning your hard drive, it would be the best choice to install everything. After using Linux sometime you'll learn which package is for what and begin to eliminate the ones that doesn't fit your needs.
• Rebooting the Computer
  
  Reboot your system and when you see "LILO" type linux and enter to the real operating system for the first time.

Some distributions like Redhat, Debian have some easier ways to install Linux. Most of them has a directory in the CD-ROM for rebooting directly into installation process without preparing boot and root disks. It is called Autoboot.exe which is in the directory of Dosutils in Redhat and Boot.bat which is in Boot directory in Debian.