Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: Installing RedHat 6.0

Author:Karl Fast
Posted:5/10/1999; 10:34:30 AM
Topic:Installing RedHat 6.0
Msg #:5936 (In response to 5930)
Prev/Next:5935 / 5937

You shouldn't have much problems installing it Dave.

I've installed Caldera 1.1, RH 5.0, and RH 5.2 on several different machines, including an old Toshiba Laptop, and found it to be surprisingly painless. Getting X to work on the laptop was tricky, but eventually I found someone else who had done it and voila! Not having much of a unix background (and certainly not installing or maintaining unix), there were a lot of things to learn, and quite a few to unlearn.

Things that helped me:

  1. Reading the installation guide. I successfully installed RH without the guide, which was a litmus test of sorts, but then I went back and did it again with the guide and picked up some important subleties.
  2. Doing a full install, so that all the software was installed. I did partial installs and found myself going back to the CD many times to get additional packages. The first time around it's much easier to install everything.
  3. Hitting the Linux Documentation Project (LDP). The HOW-TO's provide an amazing level of technical details. Sometimes "more than I wanted to know", but the expertise here is phenomenal. Much more depth than similar docs I've seen from commercial products
  4. After mucking around for a few weeks, compiling software, making mistakes, and generally doing everything I could to destroy my system --short of running rm -rf /* as root-- and finding that it continued to work, I wiped it all and started again. The second time around was less painful and I learned a lot more.
  5. Biting the bullet and learning Emacs (I flipped a coin and Emacs won over vi). Initially I used PICO since it was brain dead easy, but it didn't take long to find out that I needed a more powerful editor.
  6. Switching to a better window manager. I understand RH 6.0 comes with KDE and GNOME/Enlightenment, so this isn't as critical anymore. But the stuff that RH 5.2 ships with is awful. Afterstep is OK, but it wasn't configured the way I wanted it and I eventually switched to Window Maker.

Things that did not help:

  1. Coming to Linux with an NT mentality. Unix has a fundamentally different design from NT and most other OSes, and while I understood that, I hadn't really come to grips with it until I had to install and administer my own Linux box. I had to unlearn the NT way of doing many things. Pros and cons on both sides.
  2. Thinking "this will be easy". There are so many different combinations of hardware that installing on some machines is much simpler than any other OS, and on others a complete nightmare. Not that easy to predict if it will work. If your attitude is "this will be hard", then at worst you'll meet expectations and have a good chance of being pleasantly surprised. In most cases installation is pretty easy, but I agree with Eric -- there is often one card that causes problems.
  3. Believing Linux is a replacement desktop system. Not yet. Reviews say that Caldera 2.2 and RH 6.0 are a monstrous step in the right direction thanks to KDE and GNOME. But I still find myself doing a lot of "desktop end user" type stuff on NT.

Welcome to Linux, Dave.

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