I have used Linux many years ago but never was very good at it. I have a small home network and recently acquired a 1 gHertz computer that I would like to install Red Hat Linux on. the computer has Windows 2000 on it and I don't need it. Can someone help me with instructions on downloading and installing Linux on the windows 2000 computer. My Linux books are all out of date, I have the Red Hat Linux 7.3 Bible which I am reading.
Old Man

If I were you I would download a updated distro of Redhat or Fedora 8 and install it. instructions for burning from windows are available on here if you look. make sure your computer boots from cd rom and it goes easy from there.

I would have to know if you have a computer that can burn CD's (or DVD's if you have a DVD drive) and if this computer is the one, is Windows 2000 presently usable or do you have a working copy of Red Hat.

Starting simply, you need to get Red Hat (I could suggest a better version of Linux for that system) on media that is bootable. (put in, turn on and it automatically loads the media)

If you have that media already and it is bootable it is as simple as first

All drivers... you should have checked compatibility previous to installing anything new.

1. enter BIOS through hitting F2, Delete, F10 or what ever key is announced in the first 10 seconds of the startup.
2. once BIOS screen pops up (menu with words like 'Boot Sequence' in it) you need to find out what device the computer is booting to, that is the boot sequence.
3. make sure that the media device ie. CD Rom is the first device that the computer boots to first and save settings (each BIOS can be different so look how to save)
4. Now make sure the CD or DVD is in the drive upon restart.
5. You should now see at the most a choice that states 'are you sure you want to boot from the CD' but most the time the OS will just start up.
6. If all is good, you are now looking at Linux.
7. Let the system set the drives swap files and all other settings and do not add any packages other than what is default. Some packages conflict and some older Red Hat OS's were not good about getting the dependencies right.
8. All parts not installed can be installed later as long as you have a network card that is working.
9. After a restart, it may boot to CD again... you will want to go into BIOS again and set back to boot from device 0 or where ever you hard drive is.
10. That should work.

You mentioned Red Hat and since some versions of Red Hat are no longer free to download... I stay away from it but this is a good place to start

http://fedoraproject.org/get-fedora

Fedora is a Red Hat OS

Go there and choose the one you want but to download it you need a computer with:

Internet access
1. cd/dvd burner
2. Nero, Alcohol 120 or some burning software that can handle the image type (likely ISO)
3. Blank CD or DVD depending on the image downloaded.
4. patience.

Downloading an OS is slow. Your internet connection may usually be fast but maybe the Linux site is not....

I have gotten free Linux distributions from books about Linux, College campuses and from friends that use Linux as it is not illegal to install on more than one computer. I hate downloading Linux but have when I had to.


Once you have the 'disc image' (that is the file that says x86_blah_blah.iso) you need to open the software that you will use to burn the image to a disc and find the part that says 'burn from image' and then locate the .iso image through the computers interface and start burning it... the end result, it will be bootable as Linux is not nearly as picky as XP, 2000 or the cursed Vista. SO>>>>

once the cd spits out and says burn successful or makes whatever sound that means it is done, you can insert into the computer needing the OS and simply hold the power button down for 10 seconds and then turn it back on.



(the 10 second thing is a hard reset and this is the only time that using it will not hurt your computer as if the file system is corrupt from it... you will be formating it to reinstall anyway.)

If you have broadband Internet access and a CD-R or CD-RW then I recommend the following method of downloading and installing Linux.

Debian has an install that works mostly by installing packages from the online Debian repository. You start out by downloading a small Debian install CD image.

http://www.debian.org/distrib/netinst#smallcd

Then you burn that CD image to a CD-R and boot the CD-R. Turn on all of your devices including your Internet access so that the Debian installer can find them and boot the CD-R. The CD-R boots into the Debian installer.

The Debian installer goes into partitioning. It will install Debian on free space so you tell the installer to delete all of the old partitions that you no longer want and then tell the installer how to set up the Debian partitions in the free space now available.

Then let the Debian installer do the install. It will go to a Debian repository and download and install a fairly basic Debian system using gnome as the GUI.

Once the install is done boot into your new Debian system. Your new system is set up to maintain Debian from Debian's online repository. You can install any of thousands of packages from Debian's repository or you can delete any package on your system. The GUI version of the Debian package manager is called synaptic. You can run synaptic from a Gnome menu. Or as root you can open a terminal and type in the synaptic command. Or as user you can open a terminal and issue the command:

gksu synaptic

Once you are in synaptic you can explore the repository packages, look at their descriptions, and install whatever combination of packages suites your fancy.

Also from time to time you will get messages saying that there are newer versions of some of your installed packages available at the Debian repository and do you want to install them? If you agree then your packages are automatically updated.

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Steve Stites

Thanks for the reply Jailbait, I followed your instructions and went to the Debian site. The first think I saw was that I had a choice of 6 or 7 different packages. I didn't know which one to download so I picked i386 and downloaded and burned it to a CD. I prpared the target machine by deleting the old ntfs partition creating a new dos primary partition and formatting it. The Debian CD would not boot. I have an old Rethat bible with Version 7.2 and booted it and completed the install. I am curious about what went wrong with the Debian. Thanks again Old Man rhbryant@comcast.net