Starting the Installation Program

There are several ways to start the installation. You can:

insert the diskette included in your boxed set (or a PCMCIA boot or network boot disk that you've created) into the primary diskette drive and reboot your computer
insert the Red Hat Linux CD into the drive and reboot, if your computer can boot from the CD-ROM drive
boot MS-DOS, and start a program in the dosutils directory of the Red Hat Linux CD-ROM named autoboot.bat (this will work from DOS only; it will not work from a DOS window started from Windows)

While the installation program loads, messages will scroll on your screen. When the installation program has loaded, this prompt appears:

	boot:

Displaying Online Help

Once the installation program is loaded into memory, you can obtain information about the installation process and options by pressing F1 through F6. For example, press F2 to see general information about the online help screens.

Text Mode Boot Options

If you press Enter at the boot prompt, or if you take no action within the first minute after the boot prompt appears, the graphical installation program, as explained in the Official Red Hat Linux Installation Guide, starts. Pressing one of the help screen function keys as described above disables this autostart feature.

To start the text mode installation program explained here, before pressing Enter, type:

	  boot: text

If the installation program does not properly detect your hardware, you may need to restart the installation in "expert" mode. To start an expert mode installation, type:

	  boot: text expert

Expert mode disables most hardware probing, and gives you the option of entering options for the drivers loaded during the installation.

	Please Note
	The initial boot messages will not contain any references to SCSI or network cards. This is normal; these devices are supported by modules that are loaded during the installation process.

Note that the command to start a serial installation has changed. If you must perform the installation in serial mode, type:

	  boot: linux console=<device>

Where <device> should be the device you are using (such as ttyS0 or ttyS1).

Other options that may be entered with the boot command include passing options to the kernel. For example, to instruct the kernel to use all the RAM in a 128 MB system, enter:

	  boot: linux mem=128M