cuscus RedHat 7.1 Installation and Setup

Things You Should Know Before The Install Starts

1. My comments in the install section will be listed in italics .
2. The type of graphics card and the amount of video RAM your PC has. The rest of the hardware should be auto detected if you followed the MFCF Linux Support guidelines.
3. <Hostname> (that was registered with "hostmaster@ist.uwaterloo.ca") along with its IP address (129.97.NNN.XXX). In this case it's 129.97.91.34
4. Router (Gateway) IP if it's not 129.97.NNN.1, where NNN designates the subnet your host will be attached to. It is 129.97.91.1.

Operating System Install

• This Dell system does not like to boot from the PQ Partition Magic Boot disk, so create a Windows boot floppy, boot from that and then insert the PQ magic executable disk and run pqmagic.
• The Linux network boot floppy does not recognize the PCcard so do the installation from CD.
• Every time the laptop boots without the cd player installed, the bios gets changed to boot from the hard drive before the cd player so you need to go into the bios (F2) and set the laptop to boot from cd player before the hard drive.

Initial booting of Dell Latitude Model PP01L (no docking station).

• Used PQ's Partition Magic to layout the disk partitions. (I think PQ Partition Magic is UW Site licensed, see IST help desk?) Dell ships some hidden files at the end of the disk (the last 7.8 MB) so don't touch that area. Resize the Windows partition to first 4 GB of disk, then add a 0.5 GB Linux swap partition, next a 3.00 GB Linux ext2 partition for Linux OS, and lastly partition the rest of the disk except the last 7.8 MB as Linux ext2 partition. All 4 are primary type partitions.
• Place the Red Hat 7.1 (Seawolf) disk 1 of 2 in the CD player. (ISO images of these disks are available from ftp.linux.math.uwaterloo.ca.)
• Reset or power cycle the PC hardware.
• Enjoy the various machine-dependent messages as they scroll past: blah, blah, blah ... until you reach the "Welcome to Red Hat Linux 7.1!" screen.
  Since we are using the graphical user interface, all we want to do is hit enter.
• Initial booting messages stream past and then ... the Graphical User Interface (GUI) install starts.

You will notice that the window is divided into two parts: the "Online Help" on the left side and "User Selections" on the right.

Each of the following ordered list items correspond to a seperate window whose name is displayed in the top left corner of the "User Selections" window. You use the "Back" and "Next" buttons in the lower right corner of the screen to move between windows. The bolded text below itemizes the recommended settings for each of the "User Selections" Windows.

The bolded text below itemizes the recommended settings for each of the "User Selection" Windows.

Answering the OS Install Questions.

1. Choose a Language

   English

2. Keyboard Configuration
   Always try to use the default setting first.

   Model

   Generic 105-key (Intl) PC

   Layout

   U.S. English

   Dead Keys

   Enable dead keys

3. Mouse Configuration
   Always try to use the default setting first.

   Generic

   3 Button Mouse (PS/2)

4. Welcome

   Nothing to enter on this screen.

5. Installation Type

   Custom Setup

6. Disk Partitioning

   Manually partition with Disk Druid

   The real partitioning of the disk was done before the install started with PQ partition magic.

7. Disk Druid

   Edit hda1 to have

   Mount Point:

   /win2k

   Edit hda3 to have

   Mount Point:

   /fsys1

   Edit hda4 to have

   Mount Point:

   /

8. Choose Partitions to Format

   Always format "/", and (only if you haven't done it recently or suppect that your disk is flacky) "check for bad blocks while formatting".

   Don't format /fsys1 or /win2k as we don't want to loose any information already on those partitions.

9. LILO Configuration

   We don't have a floppy drive available so

   uncheck

   Create boot disk

   We want to use LILO to handle booting.

   check	Install LILO
   select	/dev/hda Master Boot Record (MBR)

   Since we want to use "lba32" mode of addressing the disk drive,

   uncheck

   Use linear mode (needed for some SCSI drives)

   Select the Device that has the OS installed that you want booted by default and make sure that the "Default boot image" box is checked. In this case it's RedHat_7.1

   You can also change the labels of the boot devices as you like by selecting the "Device" and entering the new label in the "Boot label: " box. Labels set to Win2k and RedHat_7.1

10. Network Configuration

    eth0

    We don't use DHCP so,

    uncheck

    Configure using DHCP

    We want the network to be active each time we boot,

    check

    Activate on boot

    IP Address:	129.97.91.34
    Netmask:	255.255.255.0
    Network:	129.97.91.0
    Broadcast:	129.97.91.255

    Hostname:	cuscus.math
    Gateway:	129.97.91.1
    Primary DNS:	129.97.128.100
    Secondary DNS:	129.97.128.10

11. Firewall Configuration

    We setup our firewalling as part of the post install.

    select

    No firewall

12. Language Selection

    Select the languages first

    check	English (Canada)
    check	English (Great Britain)
    check	English (USA)

    And then

    Choose the default language:

    English (Canada)

13. Time Zone Selection

    Do not select "System clock uses UTC" since we will be dual booting the host where one of the choices is a Microsoft OS.

    Click on map to select time zone or scroll through options and select one of the "Eastern Time" zone choices.

    Location: ... Eastern Time

14. Account Configuration

    Set a "Root Passwd" and "Confirm" it.

    I recommend setting up additional accounts after the OS is installed. You can then use the command "adduser".

15. Authentication Configuration

    Enable MD5 passwords
    Enable shadow passwords

    DO NOT select "Enable NIS", "Enable LDAP", or "Enable Kerberos".

16. Package Group Selection

    These choices were selected:

    "X Window System", "GNOME", "KDE", "Mail/WWW/News Tools", "DOS/Windows Connectivity", "Graphics Manipulation", "Multimedia Support", "Laptop Support", "Networked Workstation", "Dialup Workstation", "Network Management Workstation", "Authoring/Publishing", "Emacs", "Development", "Kernel Development", "Utilities".

    Also checked Select individual packages

17. Individual Package Selection Only changes to the settings created by the previous step are noted bellow.

    From the "Applications -> Archiving" group of packages,
    select:

    
    unarj

    From the "Applications -> Communications" group of packages,
    unselect:

    
    efax

    
    select:

    
    gkermit

    From the "Applications -> Editors" group of packages,
    select:

    
    vim-X11
    vim-enhanced
    xemacs
    xemacs-el
    xemacs-info

    From the "Applications -> Engineering" group of packages,
    select:

    
    gnuplot
    octave
    units

    From the "Applications -> File" group of packages,
    select:

    
    tree

    From the "Applications -> Internet" group of packages,
    select:

    
    x3270-text
    xmailbox
    xrn
    ytalk

    From the "Applications -> Multimedia" group of packages,
    select:

    
    gimp-data-extras
    transfig
    xfig
    xmms-gnome

    From the "Applications -> Publishing" group of packages,
    select:

    
    enscript
    tetex-doc

    From the "Applications -> System" group of packages,
    select:

    
    gnome-linuxconf
    linuxconf
    macutils
    procinfo
    symlinnks
    sysctlconfig
    tripwire
    usbview
    xcpustate
    xosview
    xsysinfo
    xtoolwait

    
    unselected:

    
    mt-st

    From the "Applications -> Text" group of packages,
    select:

    
    mawk
    rgrep

    From the "Development -> Debuggers" group of packages,
    select all in group

    From the "Development -> Libraries" group of packages,
    select:

    
    blas
    lapack

    
    unselect:

    
    krb5-devel

    From the "Development -> Tools" group of packages,
    select all in group

    From the "Documentation" group of packages,
    select:

    
    bash-doc
    blas-man
    lapack-man
    python-man

    From the "System Environment -> Base" group of packages,
    unselected:

    
    nss_ldap
    pam_krb5
    rhn_register
    rhn_register_gnome
    up2date
    up2date_gnome
    wireless tools
    yptools

    From the "System Environment -> Daemons" group of packages,
    select:

    
    ntp

    
    unselected:

    
    finger-server
    printconf
    printconf-gui
    rusers-server
    talk-server
    telnet-server
    ypbind
    ypserv

    From the "System Environment -> Libraries" group of packages,
    select:

    
    Wnn6-SDK
    fnlib
    libPropList

    
    unselect:

    
    krbafs

    From the "System Environment -> Shells" group of packages,
    select all in group

    From the "User Interface -> Desktops" group of packages,
    Select all in group

    From the "User Interface -> X" group of packages,
    Select all in group

18. Unresolved Dependencies

    Still need to find where Canna-libs and WindowMaker-libs come from.!
    select Install packages to satisfy dependencies.

19. X Configuration

    ATI Rage Mobility
    

    Video card RAM:

    8 MB

20. Monitor Configuration

    Left it using the DDC Probed Monitor -> Laptop Screen
    Horizontal Sync: 30-110 KHz
    Vertical Sync: 60-110 Hz

21. Customize Graphics Configuration

    Color Depth: True Color (24 Bit)
    Screen Resolution: 1400 x 1050

    Default desktop environment KDE

    Login type Graphical

22. About to Install

    Last chance to "backup" and make changes. Once you're happy...

23. Installing Packages

    Nice GUI shows you how the install is going. When it is done you automatically switch to the next section.

24. Congratulations

    Nothing to do but hit Exit.

Updating the System

We use IST's (Jeff Voskamp's) UWupdates package to keep system up to date, so install it.

rpm -ivh ftp://rha.uwaterloo.ca/linux/UWupdates.i386.rpm

"lynx" config file must be changed to tell it to use passive ftp service.

echo "FTP_PASSIVE:TRUE" >> /etc/lynx.cfg

Update the system.

ListUpdates | ApplyUpdates

Change the default timeout for the OS selector to 10 seconds by changing the "timeout=50" line in /etc/lilo.conf to timeout=10 and then running "lilo"

reboot host to make sure all updates have taken affect.

reboot

Apply MFCF's Post Installation scripts.

After the host has rebooted, logon as root, use a web tool to download the compressed tar file "postinstallation.tar.gz" into the "/root" directory.

Unpack the compressed tar file and run the hostsetup script the MFCF.postinstallation directory.

cd /root; tar zxvf postinstallation.tar.gz
chown -R root.root MFCF.postinstallation
cd MFCF.postinstallation; ./hostsetup -v