Starting the Installation Program

Now it's time to begin installing Red Hat Linux. To start the installation, you must first boot the installation program. Please make sure you have all the resources you'll need for the installation. If you've already read through Official Red Hat Linux Installation Guide, and followed the instructions, you should be ready to begin.

Please Note

Occasionally, some hardware components require a driver disk during the installation. A driver disk adds support for hardware that is not otherwise supported by the installation program. The driver disk could be produced by Red Hat, it could be a disk you make yourself, or it could be a disk that a hardware vendor includes with a piece of hardware.

If a screen appears prompting you to insert a driver disk, and you have a vendor supplied driver disk, please do so. Another source for finding driver disks is at http://www.redhat.com/support/errata/. For more information about driver disks, refer to Appendix C.

Booting the Installation Program

	Please Note
	If you need to create a boot disk, please refer to section Step 6 - How Do You Want to Start the Installation? in the Official Red Hat Linux Installation Guide.

Insert the boot disk into your computer's first diskette drive and reboot (or boot using the CD-ROM, if your computer supports this). Your BIOS settings may need to be changed to allow you to boot from the diskette or CD-ROM.

Tip

To change your BIOS settings, you will need to take note of the instructions given when your computer first begins to boot. Often you will see a line of text telling you to press the Del key to enter the BIOS settings. Once you have done whatever process is needed to enter your computer's BIOS, you can then change the boot order to allow your computer to boot from the CD-ROM drive or diskette drive first when bootable software is detected. For more information, please refer to the documentation that came with your system.

There are four possible boot methods:

Bootable CD-ROM -- your machine supports a bootable CD-ROM drive and you want to perform a local CD-ROM installation.
Local boot disk -- your machine will not support a bootable CD-ROM and you want to install from a local CD-ROM or a hard drive.
Network boot disk -- use to install from NFS, FTP and HTTP installation methods.
PCMCIA boot disk -- use in cases where you need PCMCIA support, but your machine does not support booting from the CD-ROM drive or if you need PCMCIA support in order to make use of the CD-ROM drive on your system. This boot disk offers you all installation methods (CD-ROM, hard drive, NFS, FTP, and HTTP).

After a short delay, a screen containing the boot: prompt should appear. The screen contains information on a variety of boot options. Each boot option also has one or more help screens associated with it. To access a help screen, press the appropriate function key as listed in the line at the bottom of the screen.

You should keep two things in mind:

The initial screen will automatically start the installation program if you take no action within the first minute. To disable this feature, press one of the help screen function keys.
If you press a help screen function key, there will be a slight delay while the help screen is read from diskette.

Normally, you'll only need to press Enter to boot. Watch the boot messages to see whether the Linux kernel detects your hardware. If it does not properly detect your hardware, you may need to restart the installation in "expert" mode. If your hardware is properly detected, please continue to the next section.

Expert mode can be entered using the following boot command:

	  boot: linux expert

If you do not wish to perform a CD-ROM GUI installation, you can choose to perform a text mode installation by using the following boot command:

	    boot: text

For text mode installation instructions, please refer to Chapter 14.

The command to start a serial installation has changed. If you need to 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).

To explicitly request a dialog where you can configure additional devices (such as ISA devices) include the 'isa' directive:

boot: linux isa

Please Note

If the Mouse Not Detected screen (see Figure 15-1) appears, then the installation program was not able to identify your mouse correctly.

You can choose to continue with the GUI installation or use the text mode installation which does not require using a mouse. If you choose to continue with the GUI installation, you will need to provide the installation program with your mouse configuration information (see Figure 15-4).

Figure 15-1. Mouse Not Detected

For text mode workstation-class installation instructions, please refer to the Official Red Hat Linux Installation Guide.

For text mode custom installation instructions, please refer to Chapter 14.

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

Options can also be passed to the kernel.

For example, to instruct the kernel to use all the RAM in a 128MB system, enter:

	  boot: linux mem=128M

After entering any options, press Enter to boot using those options.

If you do need to specify boot options to identify your hardware, please make note of them -- they will be needed during the LILO configuration portion of the installation (please see the section called Installing LILO for more information).

Booting without diskettes

The Red Hat Linux/Intel CD-ROM can also be booted by computers that support bootable CD-ROMs. Not all computers support this feature, so if yours can't boot from the CD-ROM, there is one other way to start the installation without using a boot disk. The following method is specific to Intel-based computers only.

If you have MS-DOS installed on your system, you can boot directly from the CD-ROM drive without using a boot disk.

To do this (assuming your CD-ROM is drive d:), use the following commands:

	    C:\> d:
	    D:\> cd \dosutils
	    D:\dosutils> autoboot.bat

This method will not work if run in a DOS window -- the autoboot.bat file must be executed with DOS as the only operating system. In other words, Windows cannot be running.

If your computer can't boot directly from CD-ROM (and you can't use a DOS-based autoboot), you'll have to use a boot diskette to get things started.