Copyright is a source of much and continuous debate on the
LDP mailing list. For more in depth information please consult
the Manifesto at the LinuxDoc site.
The purpose of having a license is to allow appropriate distribution.
You can use any license that meets the Manifesto.
What follows is a boilerplate licence.
Copyright (c) 2000 by Miroslav "Misko" Skoric.
Please freely copy and distribute (sell or give away) this document in
any format. It's requested that corrections and/or comments be fowarded
to the document maintainer. You may create a derivative work and distribute
it provided that you:
Send your derivative work (in the most suitable format such as
sgml) to the LDP (Linux Documentation Project) or the like for posting
on the Internet. If not the LDP, then let the LDP know where it is
available.
License the derivative work with this same license or use GPL.
Include a copyright notice and at least a pointer to the license used.
Give due credit to previous authors and major contributors.
If you're considering making a derived work other than a translation,
it's requested that you discuss your plans with the current maintainer.
Use the information in this document at your own risk. I disavow any
potential liability for the contents of this document. Use of the
concepts, examples, and/or other content of this document is entirely
at your own risk.
All copyrights are owned by their owners, unless specifically noted
otherwise. Use of a term in this document should not be regarded as
affecting the validity of any trademark or service mark.
Naming of particular products or brands should not be seen as endorsements.
You are strongly recommended to take a backup of your system before
major installation and backups at regular intervals.
This is not the first release of this mini-HOWTO. I
hope to improve it whenever possible.
Beside that, there are other documents that may help you to
install more than one operating system on the same computer.
You may look for them at the same location where you get
Linux+WindowsNT mini-HOWTO.
This mini-HOWTO would be improved from time to time. If you think
that the HOWTO on your Linux installation CD is some out-of-date, you
may check for newest release on the Internet. It could be found within
the main
Linux Documentation Project
homepage.
These are intended as the primary starting points to
get the background information as well as show you how to solve
a specific problem.
Some relevant HOWTOs are Bootdisk, Installation, SCSI and UMSDOS.
The main site for these is the
LDP archive
at Metalab (formerly known as Sunsite).
These are the smaller free text relatives to the HOWTOs.
Some relevant mini-HOWTOs are
Backup-With-MSDOS, Diskless, LILO, Large Disk,
Linux+DOS+Win95+OS2, Linux+OS2+DOS, Linux+Win95,
Linux+WinNT, Linux+NT-Loader, NFS-Root, Win95+Win+Linux,
ZIP Drive .
You can find these at the same place as the HOWTOs, usually in a sub directory
called mini. Note that these are scheduled to be converted into SGML and
become proper HOWTOs in the near future.
In most distributions of Linux there is a document directory installed,
have a look in the
/usr/doc directory.
where most packages store their main documentation and README files etc.
Also you will here find the HOWTO archive (
/usr/doc/HOWTO)
of ready formatted HOWTOs
and also the mini-HOWTO archive (
/usr/doc/HOWTO/mini)
of plain text documents.
Many of the configuration files mentioned earlier can be found in the
/etc
directory. In particular you will want to work with the
/etc/fstab
file that sets up the mounting of partitions
and possibly also
/etc/mdtab
file that is used for the md system to set up RAID.
The kernel source in
/usr/src/linux
is, of course, the ultimate documentation. In other
words, use the source, Luke.
It should also be pointed out that the kernel comes not only with
source code which is even commented (well, partially at least)
but also an informative
documentation directory.
If you are about to ask any questions about the kernel you should
read this first, it will save you and many others a lot of time
and possibly embarrassment.
Also have a look in your system log file (
/var/log/messages)
to see what is going on and in particular how the booting went if
too much scrolled off your screen. Using tail -f /var/log/messages
in a separate window or screen will give you a continuous update of what is
going on in your system.
You can also take advantage of the
/proc
file system that is a window into the inner workings of your system.
Use cat rather than more to view the files as they are
reported as being zero length. Reports are that less works well here.
There is a huge number of informative web pages out there and by their very
nature they change quickly so don't be too surprised if these links become
quickly outdated.
A good starting point is of course the
Linux Documentation Project home page,
an information central for documentation, project pages and much, much more.
Please let me know if you have any other leads that can be of interest.