Installation of Red Hat Linux
Introduction
Generally, the installation of Linux is not a complicated process. If you are installing the Red Hat Linux on the new hard disk, you simply have to insert the correct installation CD, set the first boot device to CD ROM, restart the system and the installation will start. The Red Hat Linux detects most of the hardware automatically. Most of the persons are afraid about their SATA hard drives. I assure you that there is nothing to panic about, Linux has all the SATA drivers in its enterprise version, it automatically detects SATA and loads its driver and starts installing easily.
Anaconda is the Red Hat Linux installation program. It is a very flexible program. It can recognize the previous installation of Red Hat Linux & hence it can therefore, upgrade it. Here we will follow the graphical Anaconda Red Hat Linux installation from CD, which will require at least 128 MB of RAM in your computer.
We can even make our system dual or multi boot with any of the windows operating systems and Linux operating systems. But for this, we will have to do some extra effort. In addition, we must know about the styles and name of the disk partitions.
Hard disk partitions: The disk available, now a days, are quite large. Partitions help us manage the disks easily. Also they help protect our system. Linux is organized into directories. We can mount different directories on different partitions.
Partition types: There are four ways of partitioning a hard disk-
Primary partition: We can have up to 4 different primary partitions on a single hard disk. One of these partitions should be marked as active, to boot the O.S. from. This partition can have the boot loader, such as LILO (Linux Loader) or GRUB (Grand Unified Boot Loader).
Extended partition: If the above four partitions are not just enough, then we can convert any of the primary partition into Extended partition. We can then subdivide this partition into multiple logical partitions, as we require. We cannot use extended partition directly i.e. we cannot mount a directory on it.
Logical partition: We use the extended partition by making logical partitions. Logical partitions are volumes or in Microsoft terms, these are the logical drives.
Swap partition: The swap partition is an exclusive are on the hard disk, which is used as virtual memory. Swap is not the different type of partition, but we can mount swap either on the primary or on the logical partition itself. Recommended size of swap partition is twice the amount of installed RAM.
Partition names: The first two letters of the disk name tell about the kind of disk we are using. For IDE hard disks the letters are hd and for SCSI or SATA disks the letters are sd.
The third letter tells the disk’s position on motherboard. For IDE or SATA it is as under:
Primary Master a
Primary Slave b
Secondary Master c
Secondary Slave d
And for SCSI, disks letters correspond to their designated ID numbers. For example,
SCSI with ID 0 a
SCSI with ID 1 b
Naming of CD and DVD drives has also been, categorized as the hard disk drives.
The fourth letter tells the type and position of the partition on hard disk. The primary partitions have numbers reserved as 1, 2, 3 and 4. The logical partitions get their numbers 5 onwards. Even if we have only one primary partition, the first logical partition will get its position number 5 only.
Typical partition names
Name and details
/dev/hdb2 The second primary partition on the hard disk on primary slave
/dev/hda8 The fourth logical partition on hard disk on primary master
/dev/sda1 The first primary partition on first SCSI disk or primary master SATA
/dev/hdc As this has no number; it means it is secondary master CD or DVD on IDE controller
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