I may be installing Fedora Core 4 soon. Now I may choose manual partitioning and create a / partition, a /home partition, and a /swap partition. Which do I create first and put first on my single hard drive? I believe I've read several times if you don't put the / first the / partition might fall outside the 1024 sector and your machine might not start.

Another question I have is should I go through that LVM stuff? Or can I just skip it?

Another question is how is software installed after you've gotten to the desktop? Is there some kind of control center that you go through and you can click a few links here or there and automatically download software?

I prefer the manual partitioning myself, but largely because I prefer more partitions than the three you get with Anaconda's partitioning scheme. As for your partioning scheme, the Installation Guide for FC4 says" A Fedora Core system has at least three partitions, /boot, / and /swap". In this system, /home is mounted under / , although, I prefer to have /home on its' own partition, which permits a reinstallation, (if necessary), without the need to format or overwrite user's files. While you don't really need a separate partition for /boot, it is generally a good idea. I'm a bit of a dinosaur, but have a whopping 12 partitions! I understand that the default with Anaconda is to use LVM and you probably don't need that and for those two reasons I would reccomend a manual partition. Updating the software is simple: open a command terminal and become the administrator (called root) type: su and press enter, then type the root password. Now that you'r root, you can type: yum -yt update . That's all! There are graphical programs to do this, but the command line is both the simplest and the fastest. Anyway there is no need for hesitation, just jump in with both feet and return here if something goes wrong. Anaconda is very good. I have never had an insurmountable problem in perhaps 15 installations.

When I create partitions on a new hard drive, I tend to create the root partition (/) first then swap and then /home. I don't think it makes a big difference which you create first because if you are using newer versions of GRUB or LILO, you can boot a root partition that falls outside the 1024 sector. I always skip the LVM stuff, so I am sure you can as well.

Fedora doesn't have a control center similar to Mandrake or Suse. There is a tool called system-config-packages that can be used to install packages from your cd's. Its a totally useless app, so you may want to take a look at a tool called YUM.

just a little typo there. It should be:

yum -yt update (although the t isn't really necessary here as you are not specifying any app names)

for installing additional software (not simply updateing what you have) you can do:

yum -y install appname

and to see what you can install through yum (just to give you some ideas) do:

yum list available > yum-available.txt (if you don't use a pipe you'll get such a long list you won't be able to scroll back to the beginning in the terminal. This way you send the info to the file yum-available.txt - the extension isn't necessary but shows you what sort of file to expect.

Finally, I don't know about fc4 'cos I did an upgrade and already had yum configured, but you may need to first configure yum.conf and set up some repo's. For more info on how to do that check out http://www.fedorafaq.org/#installsoftware. Although it was written for fc3 it works perfect in fc4

There is a really nice HowTo that explains what you want to know about partition placement:

http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/doc...Partition.html

1) What-goes-where is a matter of personal taste. I put swap firsts and a lot of people put it last. You can put everything in “/” or break it up. For upgrading and for OS meltdowns, having a separate “/home” can be very useful.

If you do manual partitioning through the Anaconda installer, you can decide which partitions to create, but it may/will change the order of the partitions on the disk, which is very annoying. The Debian installer definitely has a better way to do this. If you want to lock partitions in specific locations, the best way is to create the empty partitions in advance and let the installer format them. That’s also true for Raids and LVMs.

2) 1024 Barrier: It’s unlikely to be an issue. I have RHL9 installed in the last 10GB of a 200GB drive on a P-III system and it works fine.

3) LVMs are worth learning, but you have to put some effort into it. Like most things in linux, it isn’t intuitive. Actually, that’s the whole problem with windows users moving to linux: They don’t seem to know how to read.

Here’s an excellent LVM HowTo:

http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/doc...LVM-HOWTO.html

So you install software with yum? And this yum comes with the Fedora installation? Do you install software off the CD or DVD you burned or do you look for software on the internet that will work and download it?

YUM comes as default on Fedora and most distributions that are based on it. It installs package from the web, but I am not sure about CD's or DVD's. You could use system-config-packages to install apps from your CD or DVD media, but its a very buggy application and may not work properly.

Desktop -> System Settings -> Add/Remove Applications will allow you to install software from the cds/dvd. However, it isn't very easy to find the app you're looking for since the only way they are organised is in big groups and not alphabetically. If you have a decent internet connection using yum is probably a better choice because whatever you installed from the cds/dvd might have been updated already

Thats the same app that I mentioned in one of my posts above (system-config-packages).

eah, I know. It's just the GUI access.