Coming into the light: need advice for installing Red Hat

[Marcia]

I've got a hand-me-down Celeron 366 here; bought a new power supply and a copy of Red Hat 9 with some software goodies included, including OpenOffice, Mozilla, GIMP and KDE desktop.

The HD is about 3-4 gig and apparently has some corrupted Windows files - the previous owners might have wiped data off, it came from a large company.

Will it be necessary to put in a Windows 95(fat32) start-up disk and fdisk to get started, or can we just slip in the Red Hat CD to get rolling?

[jamesa]

If you don't need Windows on the same machine then just slip in the Redhat CD and follow the prompts. The installer will give you the option of reformatting the drive, and I would definitely do that. Go with the defaults for creating partitions.

Oh and, welcome to the other side! :)

[bakedjake]

Marcia, it'll ask you what filesystem to pick most likely. Pick ext3, as it's a journaling filesystem (no data loss if the machine is interrupted for any reason) and will be the easiest to get up on RedHat.

Be sure to buzz if you need help. You may run into a bit of trouble with video and printing, as these are the most troublesome for Linux at this point. Also, if you aren't completely married to RedHat, I would recommend trying Mandrake. I've found that it's the easiest distro for new users.

Good luck. We'll have you moving from Linux to BSD in no time. ;-)

I'm not trying to start a religious war. It's a joke, people. :)

[kenta]

Booting from CD might depend on your motherboard bios. One of the two celeron-based systems I have will not boot from CD-ROM.

It's easy enough to make a boot diskette though (which is what I ended up doing).

[Nick_W]

Yep, if you can boot from the cd. Put that baby in and let it do it's stuff!

Welcome to redhatworld Marcia! ;)

Nick