Installing Red Hat Linux on an Alpha system is slightly more complex than
installing Red Hat Linux on an Intel machine because a variety of Alpha machine
architectures exist and many different models are supported. In
general, the sequence of steps to a successful installation are:
Create a kernel disk from the image available on
the Red Hat Linux/Alpha CD.
Create a MILO disk, if necessary.
Create a RAM disk diskette, if you're doing an NFS, FTP or hard drive
install.
Load and run the Red Hat Linux/Alpha kernel, and boot into the Red Hat Linux
installation program using either the SRM console or MILO.
Please Note
If your system supports both the SRM console and MILO, using SRM
is the preferred boot method, and is the boot method supported by
Red Hat.
Install the bootloader on a small partition on your machine.
For both MILO and SRM installations, you'll need a floppy drive: a 3.5
inch high density "A:" drive (/dev/fd0). (Optionally, most SRM
installations can use the CD-ROM drive.)
Hard Drive Space:
For a MILO installation, you'll need a 5 MB DOS-formatted
partition to hold the MILO bootloader.
If you're using SRM, you need free space at the beginning of the
disk. If you do a workstation- or server-class installation and
allow the installation program to partition for you, the
installation program will take care of this requirement. If
you're partitioning manually, however, you need to start your
partitions at cylinder 2. If you try to start your partitions at
cylinder 1, you'll see a warning message. Note that
Disk Druid will not start the
partitions at cylinder 1 during manual partitioning, but
fdisk will.
For both MILO and SRM, you'll need at least one swap
partition. Optimally, the size of the swap partition is twice the
RAM of your system, up to 2 GB.
For both MILO and SRM, 900 MB is needed for a workstation-class
installation.
For both MILO and SRM, 1.8 GB is needed for a server-class
installation, or for a custom-class installation (choosing
everything).
