Installing Fedora Core 3 - Part I

Please see the notes at the end, for later Fedora releases and take them into account when following this installation guide. Why install Fedora? Because it's good to try new things! Ok, maybe that isn't very convincing. The Fedora Project is sponsored by Red Hat and is a community effort. The Red Hat developers and many others in the Linux community work on this distribution in an open environment. It is a nice selection of free, open source software. The system is relatively current, making use of the latest Linux technologies. I would also describe it as being rather well polished, from the straight forward easy graphical installer, through to the desktop, graphical configuration utilities and the graphical front end to the up2date automated software update utility. We are going to be installing Fedora Core 3, using the CD set created from downloaded ISO files. http://fedora.redhat.com/download/ Find an FTP mirror that works well for you (see mirrors in the left pane of links), download the ISOs, check the md5sums and create your CD set. For Fedora Core 3, these are the files you want. You don't need the srcrpm distribution set unless you want to obtain the source code in that manner. FC3-i386-disc1.iso FC3-i386-disc2.iso FC3-i386-disc3.iso FC3-i386-disc4.iso You can also download a separate Rescue CD image, though a rescue routine is built into the main installation image so you probably don't need this. FC3-i386-rescuecd.iso An example path where you'll find these files on a Fedora ftp mirror is: pub/fedora/linux/core/3/i386/iso/ Alternatively, if you do not have a high speed Internet connection or prefer to, you can purchase a Fedora Core CD set from a number of vendors listed at the Fedora site. It is very inexpensive. Starting the Installation After you've created or otherwise obtained your Fedora CD set, start the installation by booting the computer with disk 1 of the CD set. You may have to enter your computer's bios setup to change the order of boot devices so that the CDROM drive is searched first. On successfully booting with the first CD, this is the first boot screen that you will be presented with.

Most people will want to hit enter to begin the graphical installation here, but if you want to see some of the other available boot options, it is safe to press the indicated function keys to view the information. You can always press F1 to get back to that original boot screen, those options are just informational and present available boot commands.

Press enter to start the graphical install, and the first text screens appear. You will be presented with the option to test your installation media.

I highly recommend that you take the time to verify your installation disks. (even if you checked md5sums). You don't want to find out that you had a "bad burn" during the install. You'll see later in the tutorial what happens.

After this, it probes for hardware and the graphical installer starts. Say goodbye to those nasty blue and red screens. It's pretty slick, my mouse scroll wheel even worked during th

The next screen prompts to choose your language for the install. After that you'll see a similar one to choose your keyboard type.

The next screen needs a bit of consideration. It is where we choose the install type. This affects what packages are going to be selected by default e graphical install.

We are going to choose the Custom install option. The first and second choices are more appropriate for people who have never installed Linux before, and don't really know what they want.

You may want to try the Workstation option, but if you do you should at least choose a custom package install later in the process, when prompted. If you go with the "Install Default Software Packages" choice, you may not be very happy with those choices. Remember to watch for this screen (it'll come right after you are prompted to choose a root password), if you've chosen "Personal Desktop" or "Workstation"

If you've chosen the Custom Install Type, you'll not see that screen.

The next step, is to partition your drive. How you want to do this depends on whether or not you already have partitions. What you do need though, is at least some unallocated ("unpartitioned") space. I would want at least 8 gigabytes to be comfortable. This is the first choice we have to make.

If you have an empty or expendable drive, and really don't have a clue what you want to do, it is OK to select Automatic Partitioning. Note, however, that this will use LVM (Logical Volume Manager) partitions. You can read about the advantages, at that link. For example, it's possible to later add another disk to that volume group, and then extend one of your logical volumes to use it.

If you choose Automatic Partitioning, this is what you will see.

Now, there weren't any partitions on this drive so it's bringing up this alert. Choose Yes.

I would recommend checking the "Review and Modify" box, so you will be presented with a display of what the partitioning utility is going to do. This is a 10 gig virtual VMware disk (I did an installation in a virtual machine to get these screenshots), but it works exactly the same as a real disk. This is what the Automatic Partitioning wants to do with the disk:

Weird looking, but this should be just fine. Essentially, this is a 100 mb /boot partition (it has to be a normal partition) with the rest of the disk allocated for a volume group. We've got a 9 gig root partition and a 768 meg swap partition as logical volumes within the volume group. From our perspective, using it like this, it isn't really much different than an extended partition containing logical drives. Click Next to accept the defaults, if it suits you. If you choose the "Manual Partitioning with Disk Druid" choice, you can make standard Linux partitions. I would indeed recommend manual partitioning and keeping it simple.

Here is the modern Disk Druid partitioning utility, showing the entire disk as "Free". Click the New button, to create a partition

I am assigning the first mount point as /boot (a small partition to house the kernel and boot loader). It will be 100 megs in size, and will be formatted with the ext3 filesystem. The choices are limited, there's no 'reiserfs' or any exotic filesystems available. I am checking "Force to be a primary partition" because that's what I want, but there is really no reason that any of these partitions need to be primary. To create another partition, simply click the New button again.

I'm creating an approximate 9 Gb partition to mount as the root partition (/) and I'm saving the rest for swap. Click the New button again, to create the next partition:

This time, I'm choosing swap for the filesystem type, which makes the mount point choice not applicable. Since I'm using the rest of the capacity of the disk for this partition I can simply choose "Fill to Maximum Allowable Size" so that I don't have to specify. Here are the finished partitions. Nice, standard Linux partitions.

These are just examples, you can partition your drive however you see fit. Just be sure to allocate plenty of space for installing software, if you mount /usr on a separate partition. Nowadays I prefer to just have a single large root filesystem, so as not to waste space unnecessarily allocating it for various parts of the filesystem heirarchy. This is how I partitioned my real 40 gig hard disk that I used for my Fedora Core 3 installation. A small boot partition, and the rest of the disk used for the root partition and a bit leftover for swap. You may want to allocate more swap than I've shown here, depending on how much RAM you have, and what you do with your computer. For example, I like to allocate 1 Gig of swap for a server or development box. Having large swap can save your ass if you run into a situation where your memory gets exhausted. Next, it prompts to install a boot loader.

If you do not wish to install a boot loader (e.g. If you already have another Linux installation on the system and want to use its bootloader instead), click the Change Bootloader button. It should have detected a Windows installation if present, but if it did not you can add one here. You can probably click Next here, but you can put a check in the "Configure Advanced Boot Loader Options" box so you can see what's on the next screen. You can change some defaults or add parameters to the kernel command line. If you have nothing to change or haven't a clue, you can just proceed without changing any of the advanced options. The next step is to configure your network. At this point the installer should have already detected your network adapter.

It is configured to use dhcp by default. Most workstation users will want to leave it that way, but if you need to statically configure your network, you must click the Edit button at top right. You should, however, probably manually configure your hostname. Next, you are prompted to configure some security options.

By default, it wants to enable a firewall, and the SELinux system. Unless you understand the implications, you should probably set SELinux to Disabled. Read a little about it at that link and decide. The next tasks are to choose your language and time zone settings.

Check the boxes of any languages you wish to have support for.

Straight forward stuff. Choose your timezone. Next, you are prompted to set a root password

Do set one, and confirm it. You will create other users a bit later in the installation. Now, we move on to package installation.

It is very important that you take the time to click Details and look at the selections within each category you are installing, to make sure you aren't missing what you want. In many cases, the defaults when you select the package group will be good enough, but you probably should at least look. Note, however, that if you miss something it's not a big deal, for you can get back to these same package management screens using the Add/Remove Applications wizard once you get the system installed. For example, when you get to "Graphical Internet" software packages, if you don't click Details you won't get gftp

You certainly (unless you are doing a server installation) want the X Window System and the Gnome Desktop Environment. You'd end up installing much of gnome anyways, due to dependencies. I would also want to install KDE. Make sure you go into the Details dialog for KDE, so you get all the packages you need. I also install XFCE, for it's my favourite desktop. Another category you want to be sure and click Details for, is Sound and Video. If you don't go in there and go through the choices, you won't get software like the XMMS music player, or the K3B CD Writing application. Fedora comes with pretty much all the server capabilities that you would expect in a full featured Linux distribution

You can selectively enable what you want, here. If you are installing the Server services, I'd recommend selecting the Server Configuration Tools. Otherwise, there's no need as it will still install the utility for configuring system services. If you expect to be able to compile software, you must install the Development Tools.

Click Details and go through the choices, but it should give you most of what you'll need by default. You also want to enable X Software Development for sure. You may want to enable the Gnome Development choice, as there are some things in there that you may need to compile software. When you get to the Office/Productivity category, something to watch for is Open Office i18N.

Take a look at the System Tools category. You may not need much from there. Perhaps the Samba client software, so you can connect to Microsoft Networking shares, if applicable. Down at the bottom, under Miscellaneous, you'll see two options, Everything and Minimal. If you select Everything, all your package choices will be greyed out. You will get "everything", including packages not listed in any of the categories. Minimal is similar, if you select it everything else will be greyed out. Don't go there, because it doesn't let you choose any packages and you don't get much. Even if you are just wanting a minimal system, this isn't terribly useful. You would certainly end

This will install over 600 megabytes of language files for the Open Office suite. Unless you need support for other languages besides English and other charsets, you might as well save yourself some thrashing and deselect that package. Of course, if you do need support for a different language or charset, then you must install this package. Depending on which Installation Type you chose, this package may be selected by default. Do yourself a favour, and install the Administrative Tools category. up needing to install many more packages afterwards using the command line rpm utility. It would be better to do a custom install and choose only the packages you want. Just for the Hell of it, I experimented with the Minimal package selection choice. The finished install uses less than 600 megs of disk space. If interested, you can view a list of the packages it installed, Here (http://www.bitbenderforums.com/~grogan/fedora/minimal_rpmqa.txt) For contrast, I also did an "Everything" install, which consists of some 1600 packages, and takes up nearly 7 gigabytes on disk after the installation is complete. You can view the whopping list of packages Here (http://www.bitbenderforums.com/~grogan/fedora/everything_rpmqa.txt) This concludes the package selection.

Now that the hard work of configuring the installation is complete, we get to kick back and watch progress bars. Depending on your choices, you will likely be asked for the first three installation disks (it will warn you which CDs you need to have). The 4th CD mostly has extra devel stuff, some of which you may need to install later if compiling software. It also contains some of the language sets for KDE and other applications. Components of the Mozilla suite are also on Disk 4.

It will first take some preparatory steps and commit your partition changes, format your partitions, then the package installation will start.

It will prompt you to insert subsequent media

Now, near the beginning of the install you were prompted to test your installation media. This is where taking that time would have paid off. If you run into this:

You won't like it. You have two choices. Retry, or shut the PC off! At this point the disk isn't mounted and you can eject it and go to another PC (if you have one) and burn another and come back and click OK, but there's no "skip package" and fix it later option. It will incessantly return you to that prompt. Your install will be toast unless you can supply a CD that can be read without errors. When the package installation phase completes, you'll be prompted to reboot the computer.

After the reboot, there are some Post Install setup steps to perform. See you on the other side! Please continue reading Part 2 of this guide: Installing Fedora Core 3 - Part II (Post Install Configuration) Please see notes at the end for later Fedora releases Reboot your machine, and the Fedora boot loader (GRUB) will appear, with its 5 second countdown. When it comes up, you'll see a welcome screen.

Proceed and accept the License Agreement (You can even read this one, it's not evil)

Check your date and time

Now it's time to configure display settings

Hopefully your video card is supported, or you'll be using a generic VGA display driver. I did this install inside of Vmware, which has it's own virtual display adapter that is supported (they open sourced the driver), but this was just as easy on the real machine with an ATI Radeon video card and Viewsonic monitor. It was in fact easier, because it automatically detected my monitor as well.

If your monitor's manufacturer and model is not listed, choose one of the generic monitor options.

After configuring the monitor, more resolution choices may become available. Next, you are prompted to create a user

Hopefully it has found and configured your sound card. ALSA can probe for most audio cards and chips.

You can test your audio. You'll hear a few guitar chords. Next, it prompts you to install additional software from an Extras CD.

If you have such a CD you can click install. It's not actually part of the distribution, so most likely you will just click Next to proceed. This concludes setup. After some more agonizing progress bar screens, you can finally log on to the desktop. Now we arrive at the login screen. Click to see full size image

This is actually GDM, the Gnome session manager. If you click the Session button down near the lower left, you can choose to start the other desktops, KDE or XFCE if you installed them. It defaults to the Gnome desktop. Click to see full size image

The Gnome 2.8 Desktop is fairly nice, in Fedora Core 3. They've done a nice job setting up the menus. The first thing I'd want to do is turn off some horrible startup services. In the Applications menu, go to System Settings, and Server Settings and choose Services. All of these configuration utilities will prompt you for the root password before they launch. Click to see full size image

The more of these you turn off, the faster your startup is going to be. On my system, I disabled everything except "network", the "syslogd" daemon (for logging system events) and "sshd". You might not even want sshd. There are hardware probing utilities like kudzu for detecting new hardware that you don't necessarily need to run at every boot. You should leave "iptables" enabled, because it is what turns on your firewall rules. Read the descriptions of the services and decide whether you need to run them or not. When you are finished, you must click Save. Note that this is just for runlevel 5 (the system default). If you want to change runlevel 3 or other runlevels (you probably don't need to), then you must choose it from the Edit Runlevel menu. If you forgot something during the package selection, you can get back to those same selection screens by running Add/Remove Packages.

You will find this in your Applications Menu, under System Settings. Now, that irritating flashing red icon with the exclamation mark, at top right near the clock, is telling us that we need to update our system. With a few clicks and (more than) a little time, it is easy enough to do. You really should do this before you get too carried away making system modifications and installing software.

Take a look at the long list of package updates available (294 on my "everything" install... the more things you have installed the more updates there will be), sigh, curse, do whatever you need to mentally prepare yourself and click Launch up2date. Click OK. Say yes to creating the "GPG Keyring" entry.

Accepting the defaults (it will automatically hook you up with a Fedora yum channel mirror), click Forward and it will start retrieving the update header info. Next, you're prompted to select the kernel update package.

By default, packages starting with kernel* are skipped. You should install the kernel update. Check the box to include the kernel update. It's not really anything to worry about at this stage (you haven't compiled a custom kernel yet), for it will preserve the original kernel in your boot loader's configuration. If it doesn't boot, then you just go back and choose the old kernel from the grub boot menu. If that were to happen, you would press the any key and use the arrow keys to select other installed kernels. Now you get a similar prompt for the rest of the update packages.

Just check "Select All Packages" to update all the available packages that you have installed.

It will first download all the packages, and when it's finished downloading you will have to click to install them. After it is all complete and the packages are installed, that irritating red exclamation mark icon turns to a green icon with a check mark. I would recommend that you reboot your computer as soon as the update process completes. This should get you going with Fedora Core 3. Explore all the applications and configuration utilities. I hope you enjoy working with Fedora Core. The steps shown here haven't changed appreciably in Fedora Core 4, so the information and screens here are still applicable. Post install configuration hasn't changed drastically in Fedora Core 5, but the look and feel has changed somewhat and you also need to use Yum to install updates instead of the old redhat up2date application. For starters, the menus have changed a bit. For example, to get to the services configuration: Click to see full size image

You have to go to System/Administration/Server Settings and choose Services. You may disable services you don't need. For example, I disabled everything except Network, sshd, syslogd Haldaemon and Message Bus. (Hal and Messagebus are more important now). Note that this does not mean that you should disable all of those. Judge what is important to you. Using YUM to get your Fedora system up to date YUM is a very easy to use command line utility Gain root privileges, by typing
Code:

su in a terminal, and supplying the password. To check for updates, and download necessary indexes to set up your repository, type:
Code:

yum check-update If this is your first time running it, there will be a sizable number of updates available.

It will list the available updates. To install all the updates, simply type:
Code:

yum update It will download all the package headers for the updates

It will then present you with a confirmation. Say y and it will download all the updates for the packages that you have installed and install them:

While yum only updates installed packages, it may need to install a few new packages to satisfy dependencies. On mine here, it's going to update 42 installed packages. This is not the first time I've run this... it's just the number of new updates in the last few weeks, since I last updated this system. I'd advise you to keep up with it more regularly, for Fedora is updated often. After it finishes downloading, it checks the transactions and proceeds to install the updates:

Don't be alarmed by the number of transactions because it includes the cleanup operations and stuff after it finishes installing them as well.

When it's done it dumps a messy list of all the packages it has installed, and returns you to the root prompt. After installing major updates, you should reboot the computer even if the kernel wasn't updated. Uptime is just for egos, and it's best to reboot after libraries have been changedout from under foot. Whether it's really necessary or not depends on what has been updated, of course.