i bought the book red hat linux 8 unleashed and it came with red hat linux on a cd.im having trouble installing it though.it asks me where the media is that i will install.it is on the cd but it will only let me choose a hard drive.when i choose hard drive it says give the path of the files.and it lookes like this:

/dev/sda1
Directory Holding Images________________________________________

on this hard drive i have a 50gb windows xp partition and 30 gb of unpartitioned space which i am going to put red hat on.i have tried to copy the images to my hard drive in windows and then give that file path but that didn't work.some one please help

start off by getting a newer copy of a linux distro

try reboot your system, if it works...

Red Hat should provides very easy step-by-step installation(GUI)...

If it allowed you to boot from your media, then it shouldn't be a problem...try verify that it's not a broken/defective cd(s)...

and try pressing CTRL+ALT+F1 (or cycle through F6, don't know which VC available on RedHat 8), to view the error(s) message if any...

Hope this help.

i can't get an updated version of red hat cause i have dial up and i can put the cds in the drive and look at what is on them in windows so they ain't defective and i dont' know what the last couple lines of Iamdaniels' post means can some one traslate for me?

Redhat 9 and below are now obsolete. You really need to get yourself a copy of Fedora or RHEL or RHEL clones like CentOS. Because you are on dial up, you can order the CD's from cheap Linux resellers or ask on this site for well wishers to send them to you.

It supposed to still work even obsolete...

I can feel the pain on dial-up with low connections and some countries lack of open source software supports which resulted in obsolete distro...I'm on this kind of countries, sadly...

What's the problem, need translate? Is it a grammer mistake? it supposed to be very easy to understand...:?

Sorry if so, English is not my native language..

i don't care if they are obselote or not it is not like im going to have it as my main os. i just want to install it and mess around with linux so i can get familiar with it.and when i said translate i didn't mean into another language.i just couldn't understand it meaning put into simple terms

Things are always rapidly changing in Linux, so using obsolete distros means you are also potentially using obsolete technologies. Its okay if you want to learn the basics, but remember that when you experience problems, they could have already been resolved in newer releases.

As for living in a country with lack of opensource support, I come from one, but people source cheap media from abroad and then share or make copies.

well, do you need someone to send you CDs? check out the Ubuntu shipit thingy, they will ship anywhere in the world. here's the link.
http://shipit.ubuntulinux.org/
free CD's, free shipping- anywhere!

I feel your pain at trying linux but being forced to use an older linux. My first linux attempt was for Caldera linux (sucky!) and it refused to install. Then a friend sent me linux CD's (RH8 actually) - that was when RH8 was newer. Magazine CD's rock. - I'm now running debian sarge (net install) (downloaded) and Slackware 10.0 (ok, one version behind) and loving it.

titanium_geek

I think most institutions use Red Hat as teaching medium...probably due to its popularity...

you should sticks around with it, and once you familiar with linux...upgrade to a newer release or other distro to suit your needs.

Just need a little opinion from you, how do you compared Debian and Slackware on its advantages / disadvantages ?

I'm currenlty consider to switchs to Debian due to easy software management / upgrade and some sort of so-called large port packages support.

How Debian stability compared to Slackware in mean overall ? or if in specific ?

By the way, my hardware is notebook - Dell Latitude D400 (Intel Pentium Centrino)...this shouldn't be a problem on both distro, right ?

Okay, folks, let's get back to the original issue that IamDaniel is dealing with: how to get the Red Hat 8 disks to install. This is what he has to work with, so let's focus on helping him do it. (Ahem.)

When you boot up the RH8 CD-ROM, it must install onto a hard-drive. You'll want to point it at your main hard-drive. It should, at that point, be able to look at the geometry of the drive and see that there's a lot of un-partitioned space. The first thing that you will want it to do is to leave the primary partition alone(!) and... partition the remaining space.

To do that, you'll need to tell the RH8 installation that it is not installing "on a clean machine!" That you do not want it to simply wipe-out the disk partition table and reformat the whole drive!

A Linux system will need at least three additional partitions: one for "/boot," one for swap-space, and one for everything-else.

The RH8 disks will work... as a matter of fact, I still use RH8 on some machines... but the trick is, "take it slow... take your time!" Read the documentation thoroughly first, and the CD-ROM does have quite a bit of it on the "Help" screens. You could easily wipe out your XP installation if you do the wrong thing now.

A second disk drive, if you can get one, is highly advisable.

Iamdaniel- check out the thread in either the "slackware" forum or the "debian" forum- (can't remember) and look for "slackware users of debian" or "debian users of slackware" (I thinks it's the former.) This is sorta a thread hijack- so to get back:

RH8 was a PEST to install- especially as I was an impatient newbie. SO, the key is, take it slow. I wiped out many installs of windows and linux trying to dual boot- be careful.

titanium_geek

Thanks...but this post should point to Troubledyouth, aren't ?