Fire Up your own Linux Server

The Installation

To begin the installation, put the first installation CD in the CD-ROM drive and reboot the machine. If your machine is configured to boot from the CD-ROM, you'll see the screen shown in Figure 1.1, when the machine starts.

Figure 1.1. The initial Fedora installation screen.

The initial installation offers several options. You can choose to install in graphical mode by hitting Enter, or in text mode by typing linux text at the boot: prompt. Either way, the first thing the installer will do is offer to check the installation media for you. This is a good way to determine if your installation CDs have been tampered with, or have become corrupted. The process will take a little while, but I'd recommend that you do run this test.

Like any operating system, Linux requires a minimal set of hardware drivers during the installation. After testing the installation media, you'll see lots of text scrolling down the screen—this is the initial hardware probing process in action. Red Hat helped pioneer the development of graphical Linux installers with Anaconda, Red Hat's installation program. It includes a highly accurate probing and testing mechanism that makes the rest of the installation routine quite painless.

Once all this media testing and hardware probing is done, you'll finally see the Welcome to Fedora Core screen. Click the Next button to get started.

Selecting your Language

Figure 1.2. Choosing an installation language.

Fedora is truly an international operating system: the installation screens are available in more than 30 languages. Select your native tongue from the Language Selection screen shown in Figure 1.2, and click Next.

Figure 1.3. Choosing a keyboard layout.

The number of keyboard languages available to Fedora is similar to the number of languages available through the installation screens. Select the language of your keyboard from the screen shown in Figure 1.3.

Installation Types

The Fedora installer offers three specialized installation types: Personal Desktop for home or office use, Workstation for development or system administration work, and Server for file, print and Web server use. There's also a Custom option if you'd like to take complete control over the way your system is configured. As we're setting up a Web server, select the Server option from the Installation Type screen shown in Figure 1.4, before clicking Next.

Figure 1.4. Choosing an installation type.

Disk Partitioning

The Fedora installer offers two partitioning methods—automatic and manual—as shown in Figure 1.5.

Figure 1.5. Selecting a partitioning method.

Automatic partitioning creates three partitions:

1. The /boot partition is the home of the kernel: the program at the very heart of Linux. Fedora recommends a /boot partition of no less than 100MB, though you'll seldom need this much.


2. The swap partition is used as a fallback for memory when all of the system memory is in use.


3. The / partition contains everything that isn't on its own partition.

What, no Drive Letters?

Partitions in Linux appear differently than those in Windows. Linux partitions don't use the drive letter designations, such as C:, which you may already be used to. The primary partition on Linux is labeled / (you'll see how this fits into the overall partitioning layout later). Other common partitions on a system include /boot (contains the kernel and boot loader), /home (contains user-specific files), and /var (contains program configuration and variable data). These labels are called mount points, and we'll discuss them further in Chapter 4, System Administration.

It's possible to organize your system so that it's spread over multiple partitions; for example, it's quite common to put /var (where data, including such things as MySQL databases and Websites, live) on a separate partition. However, automatic partitioning makes things simpler, and spreading your data across different partitions doesn't achieve very much. Some administrators strongly recommend it, but the Fedora rescue CD (also downloadable as an ISO image from the Fedora Website) will help you avoid most problems that might have been aided by splitting the data across different partitions in the past. Therefore, the default partitioning setup is usually sufficient.

Using Disk Druid

Fedora also offers Disk Druid, a graphical partitioning tool. If you'd prefer a scheme other than the default, you'll need to use Disk Druid during the installation process. Disk Druid presents both graphical and textual representations of the partition table on your machine. To select a partition, click on the graphical drive representation (shown in Figure 1.6), or on the textual representation. In either case, you can add, edit, or delete partitions by clicking on the appropriate tool bar buttons.

Figure 1.6. The Disk Druid partitioning tool.

If the system onto which you're installing Linux has a previous installation of Windows (or some other operating system), you might want to manually delete the partition that contained Windows. Also, if you don't see any space marked as "Free" in the diagram at the top of the screen, you'll need to delete something to make room for Fedora. To do this, select the partition to delete, and click the Delete button.

Deleting Partitions

Once you delete a partition, there's no way to get back the data that was on it. (Well, there's no easy way. Advanced recovery tools do exist.) Delete with care!

Correcting an Accidental Deletion

If you accidentally mark a partition for deletion, or make some other mistake, you can set everything back to its original state by clicking the Reset button. The changes you make to the partitions won't actually take effect until later in the installation procedure.

Click the New button to open the Add Partition dialog shown in Figure 1.7.

Figure 1.7. Adding a partition.

From here, you can designate the mount point, the filesystem type, and the partition's size in megabytes. The window also offers further size options, including the ability to create a partition with all remaining space on the drive.

Selecting the Mount Point drop-down will display all common partition labels (mount points) available for your server, as shown in Figure 1.8, "Selecting a mount point."; alternatively, you can enter the mount point label manually. Bear in mind that these are the most common mount points, and are familiar to all Linux system administrators. Creating a custom mount point might confuse other administrators of your server.

Figure 1.8. Selecting a mount point.

Once you've created a partition, you can edit it by selecting the partition, then clicking the Edit button, which will give you almost the same options as the Add Partition dialog.

If you try to proceed past the Disk Setup screen without creating a swap partition, you'll receive the warning shown in Figure 1.9. A swap partition in Linux serves much the same purpose as virtual memory in Windows: when the system's memory becomes full, part of the data in memory is written to the swap partition, freeing up that memory space. When the data that was written to the swap partition is needed again, it is read back into memory. To create a swap partition, click the Add button and select swap as the File System Type.

Figure 1.9. The swap warning.

Swap Space

A good rule of thumb to use when creating swap space on your Linux machine is to create one and a half times the size of the machine's physical memory. For example, if you have 1GB of physical memory, create a 1.5GB swap partition.