Obtaining and Installing Red Hat Linux

Created on January 22, 1998
Last updated January 22, 1998
Written by Joshua Go

Ordering a CD-ROM

Ordering a CD-ROM would probably be the smart thing to do. You save a lot of time (in downloading), bandwidth, and money, and you don't have to figure out where to download it to.

Red Hat CD-ROMs are available from companies such as CheapBytes and Linux Systems Labs. Those are very nicely priced, and basically you're just paying for what's available through FTP. It's missing stuff that's in the official Red Hat release, such as a commercial X server (Metro-X), a RealAudio server, some backup tool called Bru Backup, and printed documentation.

Downloading to Your Hard Drive

Creating the Partitions

The process I am about to describe is when you're running fdisk, the Linux partition program, during Red Hat installation. I think it's also similar (if not the same) for running the program called FIPS.EXE, which can be found in the \DOSUTILS directory on the CD-ROM.

Running the Linux Partition Utility

This utility is called fdisk and can be run when you're already in Linux. However, since you're going to install Linux, you're not going to type fdisk as if you were already in Linux. Red Hat's installation program will ask if your partitions are ready and set up.