hi,

I have a 4.3 GB HDD and iam planning to have a dual boot between Win 98 and Red Hat 6. I have 2 partitions on my HDD of 2 and 2 GB each. Win 98 is installed on the first partition and i would like to have RH6 on the other 2 GB partition. Iam very very new to Linux and would appreciate if someone can guide me through the installation procedure of RH6 while the Win 98 reamins in first partition which will allow me to have a dual boot between them. Hoping to get some replys soon

Cheers,
Pallav

I don't suppose you have a copy of win 3.11 as well

Sorry, trying to be funny.... RH6 is pretty old. It would be better (and probably easier) to get a newer version of linux, like mandrake 10 or fedora core 2 or the latest slackware...

2 gig is not much room, but if you just want the basics you should be okay...

What sort of PC is it (ie does it have enough memory and such...)

tim

hi Tim,

Well i have got a celeron 366 with 192 Mb RAM... yes indeed I just need to start off hence these queries.. I have got RH6 cd that is why iam planning to install that...otherwise I have to search for new version..

Pallav

Don't dual boot with such little space to work with.

I mean, you would want atleast 3 gigs for a linux installation. . . and a swap partition two times the size of your ram. .. and about 2 gigs for Win98. . .

You might want to look into getting a new hard drive. They are cheap. . .

Also RH6 is older. . . while it will work, you might be at risk with older code. With your hardware I would suggest going for Slackware.

Okay, RH6 will work for a first try, but I've never installed it, so not a whole lot of help there

the 366 will be okay maybe, tho celerons aren't as good as a 366 P2 which are good... The ram is lovely. No troubles there...

So, is the drive partioned? you need to at least get win into it's own little 2 gig if you can. I don't know if RH6 can do that for you (modern linuxes mostly can). Do you have a partition tool of some type? There is always fips if you need to resize the windows.
I'm thinking from the post you already have the partition, if so, cool.

Once you have the 2 gig free for linux, you can start the install. with RH I think you need to choose custom or expert install to stop it reformatting the whole drive, but I don't know which version did what. Eventually you will get to a partitioning tool where you will need to make a /swap partition (say 200meg) and the rest as a root / partition. The drive is a bit small to worry about /home or such... You will have odd drive partition names like /dev/hda1 (where windows is - don't touch that one) and maybe /dev/hda2 and /dev/hda3 or /dev/hda5 etc... follow instructions and put in passwords and stuff and cross your fingers and hope all the hardware is compatible.

Then you just pick the packages and install. Seems easy but it probably won't be... Well, easy for me, but I've been playing with linux since about '93 And have had a permanent install since '95

Thanx Guys... for the help.... I will try all these things and shoot u with questions if iam stuck...

Pallav

No worries. I also stil think 200 meg swap will be fine if you don't need to run 10 apps at once, and you can get a good experimental linux install in 2 gig - not all the developement stuff - and you might just have to install only KDE or Gnome, not both.

The RH6 cd's with me have X Windows in that ....can that be installed as a desktop environment?

Pallav

Okay, linux is a little complex. It has layers, like an onion. Hey cakes have layers too...

Anyway, linux is the kernel at the core. It's actually a very tiny thing. Most of what's on the disk is not linux, it's just stuff that runs on linux. You have a text shell that runs on linux that gives a DOS like environment.

On top of that you can also run XWindows, which is the graphical client/server combo... But XWindows ONLY does the basic construction of the windows environment, nothing more. On top of that runs the window manager, which draw the windows. On top of that runs all the other stuff, like the start bar and filemanager and stuff.

With linux you can have lots and lots of different window managers and they all look and work differently. Some are just window managers with a menu and such, others are big desktop environments like windows. The two main ones are called KDE and Gnome. I use KDE.

KDE and/or Gnome may be included on the disk, also you will have smaller faster ones like windowmaker maybe. I don't know what might be on the CD as RH6 is, as I said, a bit older... There will be some environment there anyway. The later distros are better than some in the past...

<megaphone voice> Step a-WAY from the Shrek DVD! Sl-ooooow-ly....! And keep your hands where I can see them!</megaphone voice>

Hi,

If I just try to have a clean install of RH6 utilising the whole of 4.3 GB will that be a better starting position for me , rather than directly going for a dual boot system. As i wanna experiment and gain some knowledge abt Linux, its better to start off fresh... what do u guys feel?

I am gonna try this on my desktop..and I have a laptop as well in which i will be taking the backup of all my windows stuff....and then go for the fress and clean install of Linux...

Pallav

That's ok. I have RH 7.3 on a cpq deskpro 400 it runs good. I would say that's the best RH distro for that machine. Things really got different after 7.3

I started with 6.1 on a 486. It's not bad. Great if your just setting up some kind of router or getting your feet wet, but you will want to upgrade to 7.3 soon. There is a vast difference from 6.x to 7.3.


Also RedHat has stopped supporting RH Linux and moved it to Fedora. Fedora is too much for that machine, so I recommend going to another distro completely if your planning to use it for anything serious. Of course you could learn a lot from it before moving on.

Hi,

Well i successfully installed RH6 on my machine and guess what I went for dual boot and it was as smooth as it gets...Just a small glitch at the end though...
Configured my X Windows which uses GNOME as the windows desktop but the fonts are just too big and the resolution is also not getting configured....

I have tried almost all permutations and combinations with Xconfigurator and Xf86config but neither of them is giving me the proper screen resolution and font size.

Iam able to log into GNOME and see the desktop and stuff but everything is just too big... Please advise

Pallav

What kind of video card do you have? What is the make and model of your monitor? What version of XFree86 are you using (I would tell you the command to find that out, but I don't use XFree86 anymore; try x --version or xfree86 --version in a terminal)?

Do you have the manual for your monitor? Does RH6 allow you to choose a "custom" monitor?

If the answer to both of the last questions is yes, then try use whichever of the X configurator programs you are comfortable with to choose a custom monitor and manually enter the horizontal and vertical refresh rates from your monitor manual. If you can't do that, try a generic monitor at the highest resolution that you know your monitor can do.

If you don't have your manual, and don't know what is the highest resolution your monitor can do, go to the manufacturer's website and look up the specifications (if the monitor is still sold; if not, go to the download section and try to get a PDF file of the manual) to get this information.

Lastly, you might want to see if you can upgrade XFree86. The version that you have is undoubtedly quite old, and unless your hardware is just as old, it's quite possible that it is not supported by the old XFree86 you are using (in which case, you may well be lucky that you have a display at all, too big or not).

The bad news about that is that you would almost certainly have to compile it yourself, as I doubt that anyone has made an updated XFree86 package for RH6.

You really might want to head over to DistroWatch and start investigating more current distros, so you can download and burn one. If that is not possible for some reason, try going to your local newstand and buying a Linux magazine, which will most likely come with a coverdisk with one or more distributions on it.

Hope this helps.

You are no doubt running a very small screen size which results in the large windows taking up real estate.

Look at the file /etc/X11/XF86Config and see what you have for "modes" It may be as simple as adding the right screen size to the list.


Something like this..

modes "640x480"


change to this..
modes "800x600"


It's only the subsection that contains the default depth that gets used.