Preparing for the Installation Preparing for the Installation While the installation process is quite straightforward, it is important that you do a little bit of preparation to ensure that the installation process goes as intended. Of course, you’ll need the necessary installation disks to install the system; but it’s also worth looking over your hardware too. In this section, we’ll examine both software and hardware aspects of preparation. The Software Of course, to begin you need to have the necessary software for the job. The Red Hat Linux 9 distribution can be obtained from a number of sources. Here are a couple of options: The Publisher’s Edition CD set included with this book. This includes all the CDs that you need for the installation process itself. In this chapter, we’ll look at installation using the CDs that are included in this pack. The official retail box set. This includes all the CDs that you need for the installation process itself. It also includes other CDs that contain the source code for all the packaged software, and a CD that contains Red Hat-supplied documentation. Much of the software on these disks can be freely copied and distributed, but only the customer who bought the CD is entitled to official technical support from Red Hat. The box set also includes an array of bonus software packaged by Red Hat, as well as some proprietary software that may not be freely distributed. The downloadable CD images. In the true spirit of Open Source (http://www.opensource.org), Red Hat also makes all the installation CDs downloadable for free public use. While the contents of the downloadable CD images are identical to those in the official box set, users of these CD images are not entitled to official technical support from Red Hat. These CD images can be obtained from any of Red Hat’s various mirror web sites. You can find a list of mirror FTP and HTTP sites at http://www.redhat.com/download/mirror.html. Alternatively, you can obtain the CD images from VA Linux’s extensive Sourceforge download mirror servers, at http://download.sourceforge.net/pub/mirrors/redhat. When you have the CD images, you can write them onto CD recordable disks (be sure to tell your CD-burning software that you’re burning CD images), and then you can use the CDs for installation. The Personal Desktop configuration of Red Hat Linux that is downloaded or in the boxed set requires all three binary installation CD disks during the installation. Moreover, as you begin to explore some of the many applications supplied with the Red Hat Linux 9 distribution, you’ll need these disks for installing the applications themselves. Therefore, it’s worth keeping all the three binary CD disks in your possession. The Hardware Before you start the installation, it’s a good idea to make a note of the hardware details of the machine you plan to use for your Linux installation. These details can help you to get the most out of the installation process, and even in detecting problems in the hardware configuration itself - problems that can prevent Red Hat Linux from installing correctly. 14

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