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About the Author
Stuart Langridge and Tony Steidler-Dennison
Stuart Langridge has been a Linux user since 1997, and is quite possibly the only person in the world to have a BSc in Computer Science and Philosophy. He’s also one-quarter of the team at LugRadio, the world's premiere Free and Open Source Software radio show.
Tony Steidler-Dennison is a Systems Engineer with Rockwell Collins, Inc., designing avionics and cabin data servers for commercial airliners. He’s also the host of The Roadhouse Podcast, "the finest blues you've never heard."
View all articles by Stuart Langridge and Tony Steidler-Dennison...
Fire Up your own Linux Server
Installing a Linux distribution can be both exhilarating and frustrating. My first two attempts at Linux installs—the first in 1996, the second in 1997—were unsuccessful.
Installation routines and hardware support in Linux at the time were much less advanced than they are today; Red Hat was still at a relatively early stage in its evolution, Mandriva had yet to be created, and SuSE was just coming out from under the shadow of Slackware. After two failures, I simply decided that I wasn't going to be beaten by a Linux distribution. I set my machine up in a dual-boot configuration (including both Linux and Windows partitions) with the commitment to use Windows as little as possible. Within a year, the only reason Windows remained on the machine was my wife's lack of familiarity with Linux. Given that her computing needs were to surf the Web and read email, she, too, eventually made a smooth transition to Linux as the full-time computing platform.
We'll talk about the dual-boot option at length in this chapter. But first, it's important to undertake some preliminary research that will help you solve the issues you might experience during installation, whether you're using a pure Linux system, or a dual-boot configuration.
This article has been reproduced from SitePoint's new release, "Run Your Own Web Server Using Linux & Apache", by Stuart Langridge and Tony Steidler-Dennison. The book is designed to show you how to set up, optimize and secure your own Web server. This excerpt of four chapters covers:
- Building the Linux Environment, including research and installation procedures.
- Day-to-day Usage, including a tour of the GNOME Desktop, the Linux Filesystem, and startup and shutdown procedures.
- The Command Line, which introduces the command line, and explains, with numerous practical examples and advice, how to perform essential tasks using this invaluable tool. Includes exploration of the shell and the PATH environment variable.
- Systems Administration, including the procedures for creating new users and groups, sending email, and automating routine tasks, and discusses mounting and filesystems as well as a wide range of services.
If you'd like to read this information offline, you can download the PDF version of this article.
For more information on this title, see the book's dedicated page.
But now, let's start building the Linux environment.
Chapter 1. Building The Linux Environment
The Necessary Research
Few things are more frustrating than a lack of hardware support, especially when you've become used to the quick driver installs offered by Windows. In fact, Windows comes complete with a basic set of drivers that are intended to anticipate the hardware attached to your machine. Hardware manufacturers also release driver discs for devices such as video cards, network cards and scanners for Windows machines. Developing these drivers costs the hardware manufacturers a great deal of money, so for a long time it didn't make economic sense for hardware developers to supply drivers for Linux.
As Linux has gained market share within the server market, Linux driver development has improved markedly. Storage devices, RAID arrays, Ethernet cards—all have enjoyed increasing Linux driver development in the past few years.
In order to avoid the headache of missing drivers, it's important to do a little research before installing your Linux distribution. While it's unlikely that you'll have a problem with modern distributions, you'll still want to do the research just to avoid any hardware issues.
Most of the major distributions release hardware compatibility lists. These lists itemize the hardware that's known to work with the drivers included in the distributions. Red Hat/Fedora, Mandriva, and SuSE also provide hardware mailing lists for distributions from their Websites. These lists, though, tend to rely on users to help solve hardware compatibility issues after the fact, rather than providing information for users before an installation.
Additionally, there's an excellent compatibility list for Linux in general. It doesn't provide quite the degree of granularity you'll find in the manufacturer-specific lists, so it should be used as a fallback, rather than your primary source of information.
Hardware Compatibility Lists
Red Hat/Fedora
Red Hat's major product line is Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), which is mostly based on Red Hat's free software distribution, Fedora. Fedora is not actually maintained by Red Hat; it's maintained by the community of Fedora developers. However, Red Hat does a lot of work on Fedora, because that work flows into RHEL.
Red Hat's Hardware Catalog doesn't extend beyond RHEL to the Fedora releases, which is something that you'll need to remember when looking to the Red Hat site for Fedora support. The list provides information on CPUs, video cards, SCSI controllers, IDE controllers, network cards, modems, and sound cards.
SuSE
SuSE offers two lists: the Express Search and Extended Search. The difference between the two is that the Extended Search offers fields beyond Vendor, Device, and Category. In practice, you're likely only to need the Express Search.
Mandriva Linux
The Mandriva Linux Hardware Compatibility Database is a very comprehensive list of hardware that has been tested by the Mandriva Linux community.
General Linux
The Linux Hardware Compatibility HOWTO is perhaps the most comprehensive of the high-level Linux links. It was begun in 1997 and is updated as often as twice annually. It provides information on all device types and all major manufacturers.
Aside from providing interesting and useful user forums, LinuxQuestions.org also provides an outstanding list of Linux-compatible hardware. This is the most up-to-date of the high-level Linux lists, with updates appearing daily where applicable. While it's not as comprehensive as the HOWTO, the LinuxQuestions list is easily as important because of this timeliness.
Linux Compatible provides both updated lists, and forums in which users can help other users resolve existing hardware issues.
Installing the Distribution
Once you have completed your preliminary hardware research, it's time to walk through the installation process. We'll take a look at both the graphical and text-based installers, the second of which can be useful when you're installing Linux on a machine with limited resources. Don't forget that, if your situation demands it, you can install Fedora Core on your server without a desktop. In any event, it's a good idea to read through the following sections before putting the installation CD into your computer.
The Dual-Boot Option
We've already mentioned the dual-boot option for your server: running both Windows and Linux on the system. As I've mentioned, this provides a great set of "technical training wheels" as you adjust to the new capabilities and options in your Linux server. The following installation instructions will work equally well with a dual-boot configuration. However, there are a few important points to keep in mind when choosing this option.
- If you're building your dual-boot server on a fresh box, be sure to install and configure Windows first. By default, Windows doesn't recognize any of the native Linux filesystems. (NB. There are third-party utilities that allow Windows to read the drives of a Linux installation on the same machine, though; see pro.mount-everything.com for one commercial example.) If Linux is installed first, the Windows boot loader will take over and load Windows; Linux will be there, but you won't be able to boot into it. A Linux installation will cooperate with Windows and allow you to boot into both.
- Linux provides a means to read the FAT32 (typically used by Windows 98 and ME) or NTFS (usually used by Windows NT, 2000, and XP) filesystems. In the case of FAT32, you'll also be able to write to the Windows partitions. If you're using an NTFS-based Windows installation, the files on the Windows partition will be read-only.
- If you're installing Linux on a system that already contains a Windows operating system, it may be useful to purchase a nondestructive partition management tool, such as Partition Magic. This will allow you to move the partitions on your Windows system, creating room on the drive for the Linux installation, and preserving the data that already exists on the drive.
With the exception of these important points, the process of installing a dual-boot system is the same as a single OS installation.
Graphical Installation
Some would argue that the real rise of Linux began with the advent of graphical installers. Prior to that time, installation was a "mouseless" affair, using the keyboard arrow keys and space bar. Red Hat—the distribution upon which Fedora is based—was a pioneer in graphical Linux installation routines. Since that time, the creators have continued to refine and improve upon the process, the result being a very clean and easy-to-follow installation procedure. As you'll see in the screen shots I'll present throughout the rest of this chapter, installing Fedora on your new server is nearly painless!
I've provided screen shots for nearly every step of the process. While the procedure is easy, there are a few steps that are particularly important to a successful installation. Hopefully, the abundance of screen shots in the following discussion will help you to more easily understand the installation process.
Obtaining Installation CDs
There are two main ways to obtain Fedora Core installation CDs: you can download the CDs from http://fedora.redhat.com/download/ and burn them yourself, or you can buy them.
The installation CDs are downloaded as a series of ISO images, named something like FC4-i386-disc1.iso (FC4 means Fedora Core 4, i386 means it's for Intel x86 processors, and disc1 means that it's the first CD). ISO images are direct copies of an entire CD, stored in a single file. Once you've downloaded the images, you'll need to burn each of them to a CD. Alternatively, if you have a DVD burner, and the machine onto which you plan to install Fedora has a DVD drive, you can download the DVD image (instead of the CD images) and burn it to one DVD in the same way you'd burn a CD. Most CD burning programs offer a menu option to burn an ISO image; a list of instructions for the use of various popular Windows CD burning tools is also available online. If in doubt, the help files, or Websites, associated with your CD burning tool are likely to explain how to burn an ISO image onto a CD. (NB. If your CD burning program cannot burn ISO images, CDBurnerXP Pro is simple to use, and runs on all versions of Windows.)
Buying Fedora on CD will cost you a little, but it's quicker and easier than downloading the images if you don't have a fast broadband connection (the four CD images total almost 2.5GB). You can buy Fedora Installation CDs from any number of vendors, most of whom will charge you little more than the cost of the blank CDs, plus postage and packing; the easiest way to find these vendors is to search the Web for "cheap Linux CDs" in your country, or ask a local Linux User Group. This may well be the best way to get hold of the CDs if this is your first time running Linux.