Getting Help IP Address: If your machine is to have a fixed IP address, you need to know what IP address to use. An IP address is always mentioned along with its network mask, so make a note of both the IP address and network mask. DNS Host and Domain Names: You also need to note some DNS (domain name service) details - specifically the machine’s host name and domain name. For example, if your network administrator assigns your machine the DNS name arwen.acme.com, then your machine host name is arwen and your domain name is acme.com. The combination of host name and domain name (here arwen.acme.com) is called the fully qualified domain name (FQDN). Note If your office is running an internal DNS server, this host and domain name combination should refer to the IP address that we’ve already mentioned. Many network applications perform optimally when a local DNS server is present in the network. DNS Servers: DNS servers are responsible for resolving Internet names to the corresponding IP addresses. You should note the IP address(es) of your network’s DNS server(s). If there is no local DNS server, then it’s possible that an external DNS server is used for Internet name resolution. Red Hat Linux allows you to specify up to three DNS servers. Internet Gateway: Finally, you should note the IP address of your machine’s Internet gateway. While any network traffic for your local LAN will be sent directly to those local machines, any traffic to other networks (like those of the Internet) will be sent out through this gateway. Failure to set this value will prevent you from accessing the Internet after installation. Getting Help If you find problems, there are plenty of ways to get answers. In fact, the Open Source community boasts of a huge number of avenues that can help you to resolve your technical difficulties. For example, Red Hat itself has an extensive bug reporting and resolution database, freely available for public access at http://bugzilla.redhat.com. In addition, there are many Linux users’ communities world-wide, hungry to share experiences and thriving on a diet of mutual support (see http://www.linux.org/groups). In fact, the extent of third-party support in Red Hat Linux is unparalleled among the various Linux distributions. The Installation Having collected all the information in our hardware and network checklists, you’re ready to begin the installation itself. This section will walk you through the graphical installation tool, explaining the steps as we go. Although this section is quite long, it includes quite a number of screenshots, so you’ll soon see how simple it is to install Red Hat Linux 9 using the graphical installation tool. Booting off the CD We normally begin the installation process by booting off the first CD of the distribution. To do this, you need to have the machine switched on, so that you can open your CD-ROM drive. Insert Disk 1 of your Red Hat Linux distribution into your CD-ROM drive, and then restart the machine. The installation process should start automatically, as soon as the computer’s power-on self test is complete: 17

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