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davidlars99Flag for United States of America

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Linux installation

I got Red Hat Proffesional Workstation (all in one. total 9 CDs) from a friend of mine and I was wondering if I can install it on my PC.
it is gateway laptop with 3.6Mghz CPU. when I bought it I formatted my hard drive and installed win xp pro, later upgraded to win xp sp2. my hard drive has 3 partitions 25 GB is for windows and another two 7.5 GB are free and I was thinking if I could rejoin these two partitions (if 7.5 is not enough for linux) and install Linux Red Hat Proffesional Workstation. I can't do it alone because I'm not experienced in linux at all.
do you think you can help me accomplish all this..?

thank you
 dave
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ramazanyich
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You don't have to merge your partitions. 7.5 Gb will be enough for your installation. You even can install dualboot to boot windows XP or Linux at startup of your computer.
from 9 CDs 2 of them contain necessary packages - others contain support for multiple languages, user guides etc.
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aspirine

The redhat installer should have a partition manager that you can do that work with, however, I would recommend you to try to get Fedora Core 2 (http://fedora.redhat.com) it's the succesor of redhat and it's far better for the desktop user, only reasons I would use redhat over fedora would be for security issues on a production server.

However, the choice is yours, if do you want to continue with redhat, it's installator will allow you to repartition your hd, I would recommend you mounting / in one of the 7.5 gb partitions (more than enough for a big desktop with lots of software packages), you should split 1gb off that partition for you swap space
and you can then mount /home in the other 7.5gb partition to store files, if you're going to use both systems, I would recommend you to make both / and /home file systems to be ext3 (you can choose this in the redhat installer)
Take in mind windows can't read or write from ext3 linux partitions, so if you want to be able to swap files between them, your windows partition must be fat32, if it isn't , it would be useful to make a small fat32 partition for this matter as Linux can only read from ntfs partitions, it can't write to them.

You should try to get this done with the installer, and if you've got any more specific troubles with it, just ask.
I forgot to say,
you can always have all the /home partition as fat32, so you can use it fully from both windows and linux
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ASKER

Just boot from your first installation cdrom and when the install gets to the disk partitioning section choose manual partition with disk druid. Your windows partition should be on /dev/hda1. Delete the partition /dev/hda2 and then allocate 7gig to linux with the mount point   / with the filesystem ext3.
Alloctate 500 meg to the swap partition  with filesystem swap - It doesnt need a mount point.  RHE should recognise your XP installation and give you an option to boot this in your boot menu.
when I start setup it stops at this point

Partition Check:
hda: hda1
ide-floppy driver 0.99 newide
usb.c: registered new driver usbdevfs
usb.c: registered new driver hub
PCI: found IRQ 10 for device 00.1d.7
ehci-hed 00.1d.7 PCI device 8086:24 cd
It might be that the installer has trouble starting X on your laptop, so... to make the install "go through" (and solve the GUI problems later on) you could choose to do a textmode install instead... Info on all this should be available when you boot up the install cd1.

-- Glenn
Glenn, unfortunately it you suggestion did not help, any other ideas..?
Hm, what pointing device do you have? USB mouse? tab?

-- Glenn
pay attention and compare

ehci-hed 00.1d.7 PCI device 8086:24 cd
and
7th line of USB Controller
www.frozendev.com/3.jpg



somehow they look same to me, don't you think so Glenn..?

> 7th line of USB Controller
I mean 7th line from the bottom of the image
Yep, kind of might confirm my hunch that it's hanging/crashing on the pointing device.
Does the laptop have another pointing device? So that you could unplug the mouse during install, and reconnect/reconfig it later on... Or just run through without mouse and with textmode install....

-- Glenn
what's other pointing device beside mouse...?

I also noticed something else, you know when it starts the setup it checks up the system and spits out the result on the screen just like this

Partition Check:
hda: hda1
ide-floppy driver 0.99 newide
usb.c: registered new driver usbdevfs
usb.c: registered new driver hub
PCI: found IRQ 10 for device 00.1d.7
ehci-hed 00.1d.7 PCI device 8086:24 cd

well, alittle above this part I saw something like

too many ports use IRQ PCI device or something like that, does this ring a bell to you..?

when I get home I'm gonna get my digital camera and capture every single detail and then I'm gonna show it to you, do you think it's a good idea :-) :-)
BTW, it didn't help
I tryied "linux nousb"  at the start up line and it went thru, but when it came to the first blue screen where it says


Welcome to Linux Enterprise Installation




<TAB>/<Alt-Tab>      |        <space> selects        |            <F12> next screen


now when this screen loads, at the first second I see some window pops up and disappears right away. Then I can't pass this screen setup is stopped again

any ideas..?

I think my problem here is I'm not using proper partition, has anyone over heard about Partition Magic software..?
www.frozendev.com/4.jpg
maybe I need to properly partition my hard drive, what do you think..?
Nope, that's not likely it. The unallocated space should be fine (you're using straight normal partitions, so no worry).

But the "install-time kernel" is having problems with some part of your HW, that's for sure. Could you try booting it with both "nousb" and "acpi=off"?
The "Ooops" you see "flashing by" is when the kernel ... dies...

-- Glenn
Oh, and about pointing devices... Could be one or more of a tablet, mouse (USB, PS/2 or serial), the toshiba/IBM "stick" thing, a glidepoint pad ....

-- Glenn
I tryed Knopper and it works I also tryed "nousb" and "acpi=off" and still now luck
(Assuming Knopper == Knoppix:-)
Well, you do know that you can install knoppix to the hdd? It then stops being knoppix, and becomes "a really knoppixy debian".
None of us are married to RH, it's you who want it;-). Personally I'd recomend either knoppix (just run knoppix-installer in a root terminal window), or Mandrake 10.0 OE PP (or download if you're loath to spend the money).

-- Glenn
which one is better Knoppix or Mandrake...? I mean if you had none which one would you choose, why..?
Coming from windows.... Mandrake is real nice... But a hd-installed knoppix (really Debian) isn't bad either.... It's fairly complete, to say the least. Only thing is that some utilities are chosen from the "live CD perspective", so "sendmail" is in fact smail... Things that shouldn't matter much to a beginer.

But I'll hold to Mandrake 10.0 Official Edition (download or powerpack). It is very userfriendly... A lot of GUI helper tools etc (although you can still be as "hardcore, down to the metal" as you like:-).

-- Glenn
yes I will do so, but I hope I can still install third OS Linux Enterprise right... I couldn't find Mandrake 10.0 Official Edition can you give me some link please
BTW, I contacded linux people and they told me that DVD Rom might be the cause of my problem, they say I need basic CD Rom drive, so I'm waiting from them for further instructions about installing linux from the hard drive
Well.... We're "linux people" too.... And I'll tell you straight up, DVD-roms are not a problem. Some drives (usually the ones trying to be both dvd and cd burners in my experience) *might* have a problem with *some* disks, but generally it just works(tm).
Generally, when you have that type of problem, you either have random read errors, or you can't get it to boot at all... And you are crashing well beyond that;).

Here's a swedish mirror for the official edition: http://ftp.sunet.se/pub/Linux/distributions/mandrakelinux/official/10.0/iso/i586/
Or you might get it from http://www.linuxiso.org/ ... or some other mirror...

-- Glenn
so... I just download those top three iso files, burn them onto the CD (together or seperately..?) and boot them at the start up..?
One ISO per disk. ... At the linuxiso site they have some fairly good instructions on how to burn ISOs (http://www.linuxiso.org/viewdoc.php/isofaq.html http://www.linuxiso.org/viewdoc.php/howtoburn.html and http://www.linuxiso.org/viewdoc.php/verifyiso.html) to CDs ... And even some burning prgm that don't cost a dime to use the first 1 days... (although most all windoze programs will be able to burn from ISO... Or you could do the fun thing of using cdrecord from your knoppix boot;-).
Once you've created CDs from the ISOs just put the first CD (the one created from the ...CD1... ISO file) in the drive and boot up... and off you go:-).

-- Glenn
thanks Glenn, installation was really fast, when I enter my login and password at start up it asks me about some command I don't know what to put in there, therefore I cannot do anything all I see is the black screen...
I'll go google some keywords, see if I can find something
thanks again..!
Are we at a graphical or textmode (mandrake) login here?
If it didn't start a GUI for you it might be because you didn't set it up during install... Or it might be failing:-). In that case, just log in as the root user and rerun
XFdrake
and make sure you get the correct settings for monitor,mouse,kbd and graphics... Then test it. You navigate the textmode version of XFdrake via the arrow keys, <TAB> and <Space> (to select an action).
When done you'll be returned to the prompt where you can type
telinit 5
to start the GUI immediately.

-- Glenn
text mode I guess, all I see is black screen
... With a Login: prompt?

-- Glenn
Mandrake Linux release 10.0 (official) for i586
Kernel 2.6.3-7mdk on a i686 / ttyl
localhost login:

that's what I see on the black screen...

after I log in I see a line

[davidlars99@localhost: .....something]

if I type something it goes "-bash: cannot find command" or something like that
Ok! Progress!!!

At that prompt is where you type
XFdrake<Enter>
...

-- Glenn
that's what I did and it tells me "invalid command"
Right, you need be logged on as root, not davidlars99. Sorry, my bad for missing that.
You do remember the root password you set during install, right?

-- Glenn
it asked me the password 2 different times and I entered same password, also it asked me to pu name first time I remmember I entered "dave" and second time I enterded "davidlars99"
how do I login as root..?
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Gns

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ok I did that I saw the screen "configuring X" when I chose "test" it failed