Now what??
 

:newbie: Help, someone, please!! I bought myself Red Hat 7.0 for Dummies, with the distro included, and have spent the last 8 hours installing it. I thought I could just follow the book, but problem is I only have 260MB hard drive space, so had to do the minimal install - the installer was nothing like in the book, and as I haven't got X installed, none of the book makes any sense at all! Now I have no clue at all what to do - I don't even know how to shut my machine down, and Windows got wiped (thank heaven for small mercies...) so at the moment it's completely useless. (yes, I know that was pretty stupid, but sometimes you have to take a risk) Can anyone give me any hints on getting started, recommend a book, website, throw me a few commands so I can do something other than log in and state at my command line going 'oh, how nice...'? PLEASE! Sorry this is a duplicate post but I got the wrong forum first time round - oops!

Well, now you should have enough hard drive space since windows got wiped. Just reinstally and make sure you install X. Are there any specific questions you have? (btw, I'm a real newb at linux too, I just got RH 7.2 installed yesterday)

thanks for that - I'll give it a go in the morning. Any clues on how to install just the basics and X? Like I say, the installer on the CD is nothing like the one in the book, and I don't know how to stop it just trying to put everything on! I looked at 'select individual packages' but didn't want to leave out anything vital!

260mb is *really* tight for redhat. I'd seriously suggest you simply buy another hard disk, they are relatively cheap. Also it might be worth getting redhat 8 if you can, books are fine up to a point but they are ALWAYS out of date. a lot of the user interface stuff changed between redhat 7.x and 8 for instance.

If you really want to learn from a book that's cool, but the easiest way is to simply ask here and in IRC. linux is actually somewhat intuitive (up to a point) these days :)

I'd say get more hard drive space. I can install the minimum with Redhat 6.2 taking up about 240 megs, that's along with X and Gnome as well. So I know 7.0 is going to take probably just a bit more. With that amount of space your not going to get everything you'll probably want to learn with and even if you do get it all on a 260 meg drive, your probably not gonna be able to do much as you won't have any space left to work with.

Just my 2 cents.

The minimum RH install (all the packages it won't let you not to choose) is more than 100MB. You should take mc (Midningt Commander), XFree, a simple window manager (blackbox etc) and it will be ~200MB. The system wil work, but it won't be very useful... Try to get some more space..

Well, guess there's nothing else for it - I'm going to have to put it on my little bro's new PC (just too much hassle to find a HD compatible with mine - I cd replace the who;e darned machine for about a tenner!). Now there's just the small matter of partitioning - he's gonna kill me if it goes wrong! He likes Windows - but then he's only 12, guess he'll learn...
Thanks for the advice!