The Hardware The Hardware Compatibility List Red Hat maintains a list of officially supported hardware, called the Hardware Compatibility List (HCL). The HCL lists all the hardware components against which the operating system has been checked extensively for proper functioning. The list is available at http://hardware.redhat.com/hcl/. It’s worth checking for your own hardware components in this list before buying new hardware for your Red Hat desktop; if you find them, it can give you some peace of mind. You shouldn’t panic, however, if your hardware doesn’t appear in the HCL; there’s still a good chance that it will work with the Red Hat Linux 9 installation. Many hardware components behave using standardized interfaces that can be persuaded to work with Linux (although sometimes in a less efficient way). For example, most modern video cards support the VESA mode of graphic display, which can be used by Red Hat Linux to present a GUI front-end to the user. While the VESA mode is not suitable for performance-intensive graphic displays, it is a quick and easy way to persuade an incompatible video card to work with the GUI software in the Linux operating system. Note It is well worth using the HCL to check out the compatibility of hardware with Red Hat Linux (or, indeed, any distribution of Linux) before investing your money into it. A significant proportion of all queries submitted by new users of Red Hat Linux relate to hardware for which Red Hat has not confirmed official support. While any new motherboard or processor should safely work with a Linux basic console mode, the most common problems lie with compatibility of sound and display hardware. Due to the nature of the Open Source movement, the compatibility of Linux with specific hardware configurations can take some time to develop. Not all hardware manufacturers are quick to offer Linux versions of their driver software. The Boot Disk The installation process will also offer you the opportunity to create a boot disk. The boot disk can help you to recover gracefully if you have boot problems. While creation of the boot disk is optional, it is recommended - you never know when you might need it. For this, it’s a good idea to have a floppy disk ready during the installation process. Make sure there’s nothing important on the disk, because the boot disk creation process will overwrite it! Network Details We’ve already talked about compiling a hardware checklist before installation. If you intend to use your new Red Hat Linux desktop within an existing network, you should also compile a checklist of network-related information for use during the installation process. You may need to ask your network administrator some of these details: DHCP or Fixed IP: An IP address is essential for any computer to participate in any networking activity. So, you must ask: Is your desktop assigned an IP address dynamically (by a DHCP server), or should it be configured with a static IP address? By default, Red Hat Linux will configure your machine to request an IP address from a DHCP server, but if you need to, you can change this either during the installation process itself or after the installation is complete. If your computer is to be configured to get its IP address dynamically from a DHCP server, you can skip the rest of these questions: 16

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