Spam: Installing Linux!

[Aleksandar Milivojevic]

Jean wrote:
> I am having trouble installing Linux (red hat) on my 200MHZ pentium. I 
> download the files (FC3-i386-disc1.iso, FC3-i386-disc2.iso, 
> FC3-i386-disc3.iso, FC3-i386-disc4.iso) and burn 4 cds. Putting Disc1 in 
> the pc and boot up from it. A list of regular message is shown on screen 
> and the pc stopped at (Verifying DMI Pool Data .... Boot from ATAPI 
> CD-ROM). There is a prompt but the keyboard is non functional.
> 
> My next question to you is that should I burn all four CDs with the 
> md5sum file.

At home, I use FC2 on 200MHz Pentium MMX, 96MB of RAM (an old IBM 
desktop I bought on garage sale, two for $10 CAN) as 
firewall/router/print-server/web-server/mail-server/DNS/squid-proxy (hm, 
I guess this is all).  It runs all of that just fine.  I'm currently 
offloading services to an old Sparc machine I added recently to my 
basement (running Aurora, which is port of Fedora Core for Sparc 
machines).  The reason for moving services to different machine is not 
performance, it is security.  I just want to have firewall be dedicated 
firewall.  The only time when it choked was when I was upgrading the 
kernel last time (for whatever reason, rpm process grew to almost 200MB, 
more than twice the RAM I have in the machine).

I also have FC3 on 233MHz Pentium MMX, 256MB of RAM (Scenic Mobile 710 
laptop).  On this one I have GUI.  GNOME is a bit slow, but XFCE runs 
just fine.

So as far as performance, you should be fine as long as you have enough 
memory (but don't expect that things will fly as on newer P3 or P4 
machine, it will be slow, but usable).

For installation, since I was installing single machine, and all the 
packages that I was installing from all four CDs combined would probably 
fit on one CD (and didn't had intention to reinstall anytime soon) what 
I did was downloaded only the rescue CD.  Booted from it with "linux 
askmethod" (on the first splash screen you get as soon as CD boots). 
When asked, I configured my network card and selected HTTP as install 
method from local Fedora mirror (you can also install from 
download.fedora.redhat.com, but it might be faster to use a mirror that 
is close to you).  For directory on HTTP server you should select the 
top directory of the distribution, the one containing Fedora directory 
(usually something like /pub/fedora/linux/core/3/i386/os, edit according 
to where this is located on your local mirror).  You should be able to 
find list of all mirrors on Fedora web site.

Of course, if you are installing "Everything", or need to do multiple 
installations (or are just playing and might reinstall often), it will 
be faster (and less bandwith consuming) to download all CDs, than to 
install over the net.

-- 
Aleksandar Milivojevic <amilivojevic at pbl.ca>    Pollard Banknote Limited
Systems Administrator                           1499 Buffalo Place
Tel: (204) 474-2323 ext 276                     Winnipeg, MB  R3T 1L7