Hi All,

I have a 64-bit machine at my workplace, and had a DVD of 32-bit server edition of RHEL-5. I have Windows-7 installed over this machine already, which have 180GB HDD and 2 GB RAM. I want to install RHEL-5 on this machine, by removing Windows-7 completely. I also need to install Oracle on the same machine later, as well.
a) How can I crash windows-7 OS completely ?
b) Will 32-bit server edition of RHEL-5 will get installed over 64-bit machine ?
c) For Oracle, I think we need to select few mandatory packages under Development section by customizing the installation during package selection. What are those, or what will happen if we install all ?

Thank You all in advance,
Kapil

Hi.


When you install RHEL 5, you get the option to install RHEL over the entire disk thus removing Windows.

Running a 32-bit RHEL on a 64 bit machine should work well. Just remember that a 32-bit kernel will, by default, recognize more than 3 GB of memory.

I would probably have advised looking into OEL (Oracle Enterprise Linux) what is based on RHEL if your going to use an Oracle Database as well.

P.S. a 32bit OS can only address 4GB of memory (not to be confused with just RAM, it includes RAM but also includes other forms of memory)

Hi All,

Thank you for your prompt replies.
I have rebooted the machine with the DVD and, formatted whole windows partitions. Now I have around 150Gb of disk space with me.
Now I want to install RHEL-5 over this machine. What should be the ideal partitions for this disk , as we install most of our software under specific users within HOME directory.

Any suggestion will be helpful....

Thank you,
Kapil.

Partitioning disks can be a real pain, as one often don't quite know how it will be used when you start installing applications and stuff. But I recommend _strongly_ that you use LVM (do you know LVM?). Put /boot on a regular partition, and the rest in LVM.

And I strongly recommend leaving as much disk as possible unpartitioned. More precisely: Add all disk space to a LVM volume group, but don't use it all up when creating file systems - if you leave (as much as possible) disk space unused, you can increase file system very easily at runtime.

Can you please outline this?

Hi All,

I have installed RHEL-5 successfully and now facing problem with connecting to Internet. It is not showing the Ethernet card at all, and I tried assigning static IP address, but still it is not taking that. IFCONFIG is showing 127.0.0.1 as IP address and not changing to the assigned one.

I have started service network restart, but it is failing over 'eth0',and not allowing me to connect to internet at all. Installation was successful without any error. Could anybody please help me out in this.

Thank you all ,
Kapil

Perhaps you meant "explain"?
the direct addressing range is 2 raised to the power of the number of address bits----i.e. you simply calculate the number of unique states that can be represented.

2^32 = 4,294,967,296 (AKA 4 GBytes)

This is the amount of memory which can be DIRECTLY addressed by a 32-bit system. There are schemes which extend this, but I'm not familiar with the details. For example, look here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Extension

Ah, well explained Pixellany,

The whole 3GB thing comes from the following. In total you can only address 4GB of memory (again not just RAM), this includes most forms of memory on the system. Well this memory while including the systems main RAM also includes Graphics/Video RAM and this is the major area that appears to make less RAM appear then is actually installed. To show you what I mean I'll explain it with something that I tested out for fun... if you wish to call anything with windows fun I guess...

I have 2 Geforce x8600GTS in SLI with 640MiB of RAM (each), when I installed a 32-bit version of windows on this computer (I now only use 64 bit Vista/CentOS because of the following), 1280MB of RAM (about 1.2 GiB) was already taken by the graphics card, this mean windows barely registered 2.8 GiB of RAM even tho I physically had 4GiB in place. to make it even more of a laugh, there will be other devices with memory on them that also count towards this, even Bios itself may reserve memory allocation for things like ACPI and legacy video support. Other PCI devices might also have memory... It's quite legitimately possible to have up to 1.5 GiB of memory reserved before the main system RAM even gets a look in meaning you could register as low as 2.5GiB.

a. just format the partition it is on, and poof its gone. very simple.

b. yes you can install a 32bit OS on a 64bit CPU.

c. sorry can not help you here. have never messed with Oracle in any shape or form, but i did find these links with a fast google search:

http://it.toolbox.com/wiki/index.php..._10g_on_RHEL_5

http://searchenterpriselinux.techtar...286606,00.html

no clue if they will help, but im sure google search will pan out for you on that one.

Hi All,

Any suggestion for this problem in particular ???

Regards,
Kapil.

You'd get a better response if you asked a new question in a new thread. (The etiquette allows that. The rule is just don't ask the same question in multiple places at the same time.) A lot of people just scan the "Zero Reply Threads" and there may not be a lot of eyeballs that'll see this question...

The 127.0.0.1 address will never change. It is the address that is assigned to the loopback device.

Try the '-a' flag on your netconfig. That'll show all interfaces, not just the 'up' ones.
If you did the static IP address assignment properly, it'll show in the display.


Are there messages in your syslog (probably /var/log/messages) referring to eth or eth0?

I agree with r3sistance that this was well explained. And r3sistance's explanation was also very good.

I didn't know that graphics card can occupy that much memory. I find getting insight into memory management quite hard.. As mentioned in your post, using a 32 bit address space one is able to adress 4 GB of memory. But isn't it so that the default kernel (not counting PAE and stuff) reservers about 1 GB, leaving only 3 GB to the user applications such as oracle?

The different I/O devices also need to allocate memory, but isnt this part of the kernel memory allocation? In which address space, i.e kernel or user, does graphics cards allocate memory?

This explains things quite well http://kbase.redhat.com/faq/docs/DOC-6571. See also the links therein.

Thanks, that was very informative. Still a few more things for me to learn about memory management, but this was quite helpful.