How to Install Linux
Posted: June 23, 2000
Written by: Keith "Farrel" McClellan

Introduction

Linux – the tweaker’s greatest hope. As many of you may already know, Linux is just about the most tweakable operating system available – you have control over everything. And when I say everything, I mean everything – if you want to add or remove support for a feature from the kernel, all you have to do is change the source and recompile. Having control over everything your computer does is a refreshing thought – and can be extremely rewarding if everything is done right. And even if it isn’t, we learn from our mistakes, do we not?

In this guide, I am going to describe how to install Linux. The particular distribution I have chosen for this guide is Mandrake 7.0. As far as I’ve been able to tell, it is the easiest to install and set up, and as such it makes my life much easier (and it will your's too, I promise). My purpose with this guide (and the guides on Linux that shall follow) is to provide a free, well written, and easy to understand source for Linux information – hopefully spanning from beginner to expert. Your average Linux expert just doesn’t understand what is so hard to grasp about commands like hdparm -A1 -c1 -d1 -X66 -m16 -u1 -W1 -k1 -K1 /dev/hda (that’s a great tweak if your rig can handle it BTW… heh). Hopefully I will be able to explain some of the jargon in more…understandable terms. Before I jump into this though, by the definition of the ‘Linux-world’ I still classify myself as a newbie and any mistakes herein should be taken as such. I have had other, more skilled, Linux users read over this text, however, so hopefully this won’t be an issue.

Pre-installation

Before you even think about installing Linux, you need to find out a few things. Make sure you have a notebook handy to write down this information. You will need to know the following:

- Modem Specifics: Type, COM port
- Network Specifics (if any): Type of network, IP Address (DHCP?), make/model of NIC, etc.
- Video Card Make/Model
- Sound Card Make/Model
- Amount of System RAM
- Which hard drives are plugged into which IDE channels (or if you are using SCSI, what address they are using)
- CD/DVD-ROM drive make/model
- Anything else you think might be important (Other hardware settings, etc). This includes ISP settings (DNS server stuff, etc).

Also, make sure all of your ‘necessities’ are compatible with Linux. Winmodems will not work with Linux (at least most won’t – there are a few that have passable beta drivers, such as the Lucent Winmodems), and also, many sound cards will not work with Linux. And while sound cards aren’t imperative to an installation, a modem might be – so make sure you either have an external modem installed or a good old-fashioned hardware modem. Just FYI, people with a HPT366 ATA66 controller on their motherboards are likely to be in trouble because Linux Mandrake has a problem with that particular IDE controller – if you have a choice, put all your hard drives on the ATA/33 controllers so that there is not a problem. Another problem you might face later on is 3D acceleration. Many current 3D accelerators aren’t fully supported by Linux, so don’t expect stellar 3D performance unless you are willing to hunt for new drivers and possibly perform other steps after the installation (such as installing Xfree86 4.0 for Nvidia cards…).





Starting Setup

If you can boot directly off of your CD-ROM drive, you’re in luck – the Mandrake 7.0 Install CD is bootable. This is the fastest and easiest way to begin your installation. If, however, you don’t have it set up to boot off of the CD, and don’t feel like going to the extra trouble of setting it up, or are in a situation that you can’t boot off of a CD-ROM drive, you can still initialize setup using a special boot disk.

To create a special boot disk to install Linux off of the CD, you need to use the rawwrite.exe file in the dosutils subdirectory on the first CD. Make sure you have a blank floppy disk inserted into the floppy drive and use the program to copy the cdrom.img file to the floppy disk. The cdrom.img file can be found in the images subdirectory on the same CD. You can then use this floppy to automatically boot up into the Linux setup program. Note that this is a different boot disk than the one you will be creating during the setup process.

Pre-installation Setup

There are many steps you have to go through before the computer even starts copying files to the hard disk. Luckily, with Mandrake 7.0’s extremely slick graphical setup program, it is almost as easy as installing Windows (that, of course, assumes you are familiar with the Linux ‘terminology’ – *cough*). You begin by choosing which language you will be running in. Since you are reading this guide in English, I am assuming that you are going to choose either US English or UK English. Don’t get the two confused though – if you are from the US, choose US English. If you are from the UK or Australia, choose UK English. And, if you are from Canada – the land where all spellings are accepted, or you are simply an English speaker from another part of the world, choose your preference.

The next thing to do is choose your installation class. There are three classes: recommended, customized, and expert. Recommended is a dumbed-down installation that makes most of the choices for you and tries to hold your hand through the entire process. But seeing that you’ve got this guide, you really don’t need that. This guide is written assuming that you have chosen the customized option. It allows a large amount of customization without forcing you to understand everything about the operating system right away. The expert installation is just that – an installation for experts. If you know the underpinnings of Linux like the back of your hand and can spew out console commands like they are your native tongue, this is the installation to use – but setting it up takes hours (literally) and I honestly can’t say that I have the expertise as of yet to guide anyone through it. In many ways it’s a customized install that needs to be tailored to the user, so I will stay away from it for now.

Assuming that you chose the customized installation option, you will then next have to choose a usage option. Unless one of the other types particularly fits the use of your computer, I would recommend sticking with the normal usage setting. After that you will have the option of setting up any SCSI controllers and drives that you may have. For the purpose of this guide I will assume that you have no SCSI hardware in your system and will move on. Next you will be given the option of determining whether this is an installation or an upgrade. I would thoroughly hope that you are doing an installation, and choose as such.





Pre-installation Setup Continued...

Next you will get to setup your keyboard and mouse. Most of you will be using a US keyboard (note that US international is a DIFFERENT keyboard layout than the one you are likely to have). When it comes to choosing a mouse, choose the one that comes closest to your piece of hardware. Any mouse with a wheel should be listed as an Intellimouse (unless your brand is specifically listed), and so on and so forth.

Next up comes some of the most important settings for your computer (at least when you are talking about the initial speed of the installation) – the miscellaneous settings. Under the misc. settings, you are going to want to enable hard drive optimizations (enables DMA, write-behind caching, and other goodies like that), set the security level to medium (unless you have a permanent connection to the internet, in which you might want to go with high), input the exact amount of RAM you have in your system, and enable ‘supermount’ing. You may or may not prefer to have NUM lock enabled on startup.

Once you have set up the miscellaneous options, it is time to set up the file system. For the purposes of this guide, I will assume that you are installing Linux as the only operating system for the computer. If you were to dual boot, and you wanted LILO (the Linux Loader) to be your boot loader, you would have to make sure the partition Linux was installed on was below the 8 GB line (below the 1024th cylinder on the hard drive). If not, LILO would not be able to recognize the partition as bootable (which could end up being a serious problem).

Before I continue with the installation procedure and setting up a partition, it is important that the naming conventions for hard drives and partitions be discussed. Linux calls the boot drive of your computer HDA, the slave to that drive HDB, and so on. Each partition on that drive has a number, going from 1 on up into infinity (or whatever Linux's logical limit is). That means that what you would normally call the C drive would be hda1, the D drive could be hda2 or hdb1 (if you have two disks), etc. And that is the low down on Linux naming conventions.

You will need to create two partitions for Linux – a Linux native file system partition of at least 1.5 GB (for a full install with a bit of space left over) and a Linux swap file partition should probably be set to about 128 MB unless you have a lot of I/O traffic on your system. Before you continue on, don’t forget to mount the Linux native partition as root [/]. And make sure you let the computer format the new partitions so that you can install to them.

Next you will need to choose which packages to install. Most of them include at least one or two important and very useful programs so I would recommend leaving most of them intact. However, the one that I have found has nothing in it you may need would be the web server package (that assumes, of course, that you aren’t running a web server – but if you were you would have chosen Server instead of normal under usage, right?). After that, you get to choose the size of the packages you wish to install. I would recommend leaving this at a maximum because lowering it may remove some programs you would find useful, and particularly as someone new to Linux it wouldn’t be smart to limit your options. Once this is done the files will start loading – this will take anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour depending on your system and what you chose to install.





Post-installation Setup

Okay... all of the files are installed and you are ready to run Linux, right? Wrong – there are still several setup options you have to take care of first. The next thing you are going to need to do is setup your network – you can only set up either a modem connection or your network during setup (the other must be done after the installation is complete and you are in X Window), so I will assume you are working on a modem connection. Make sure that the modem is set to the appropriate COM port (remember, hardware modems only) and then set up your connection using the information you collected before the installation.

Next you need to set your computers timezone (an easy task) and then set up a printer. The printer is relatively easy – you tell it the type, it will autodetect it, and then you will just have to choose the closest available drivers. If there aren’t any, just don’t install the printer right away – you can do it from within Linux later once you have the appropriate driver or at least something passable. Another thing that you will be doing somewhere in these steps is setting a root password. You will be setting up some user accounts as well. I recommend putting a password on the root account and setting up at least one normal user for yourself and running off of that. Next you can go ahead and create a ‘real’ boot disk. You can probably use the same disk you used for the setup boot disk – you probably won’t need that again right away unless you messed up.

Next in the process is setting up LILO, the bootloader. Assuming you want to use LILO to boot your OS(es), the default setting for it in setup will work fine. Then you will get the chance to add OS listings to the LILO bootup menu – I would recommend leaving it alone and just clicking ok. After that you get to configure X Window (resolution and color depth – I recommend choosing one that you normally use and is definitely compatible with your video card and monitor like 1024x768x16. Tell it that you would like to test the settings and then make sure you tell it that you would like X Window to start up every time you start Linux. If you don’t, you will have to type startx after logging in to get X Window up. Setup will then push you right into the X Window login screen (KDE version unless you didn’t install it) and you will be able to start your first session of X Window under Linux.

Conclusion

Hopefully this guide has helped you install Linux and saved you some of the frustrations that I had the first time I installed the OS. Of course, it will still leave you with all of the “What do I do now?” questions but hopefully I’ll get the chance to cover that subject in a later guide. As always, feel free to email me with your thoughts/comments/suggestions.

Want to return to the normal guide? Click here!

All Content Copyright ©Dan Kennedy; 1998-2000