Starting the Installation Program
To start the installation, you must first boot the installation program. Please make sure you have all the resources you will need for the installation. If you have already read through Chapter 2 and followed the instructions, you should be ready to begin.
 | 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 http://www.redhat.com/support/errata/. For more information about driver disks, refer to Appendix C. Driver Disks in the Official Red Hat Linux Reference Guide. |
Booting the Installation Program
| Note |
|---|---|
If you need to create a boot disk, please refer to the Section called Making Installation Diskettes in Chapter 2. |
During the initial power on, you will see icons appear on the desktop, unless
you are performing a serial installation. When you see the graphical
keyboard, you will hear a beep — after the beep
press
Select the Install From icon and press
Using the
Next, select Red Hat Linux 7.1 using the
The next screen will be the Yaboot firmware bootloader
screen. When you see the boot: prompt, press
| Note |
|---|---|
To perform a serial installation, type linux console=ttyS0,9600 at the boot: prompt. |
You can boot the Red Hat Linux installation program using any one of the following media (depending upon what your system can support):
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 a network boot disk to install via NFS, FTP and HTTP.
PCMCIA boot disks — Use PCMCIA boot disks when 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. The PCMCIA boot disks can be used for 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.
As you boot the installation program, be aware of two issues:
Once you see the boot: prompt, the installation program will automatically begin 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 will only need to press
Kernel Options
Options can also be passed to the kernel. For example, to instruct the kernel to use all the RAM in a 128 MB system, enter:
boot: linux mem=128M |
After entering any options, press
If you need to specify boot options to identify your hardware, please write them down. The boot options will be needed during the LILO configuration portion of the installation (please see the Section called Installing YABOOT for more information).
Booting Without Diskettes
The Red Hat Linux/x86 CD-ROM can be booted by computers that support bootable CD-ROMs. Not all computers support this feature, so if your system cannot 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 x86-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 cannot boot directly from CD-ROM (and you cannot use a DOS-based autoboot), you will have to use a boot diskette to get things started.