Hi,

I am having a problem installing Red Hat Linux 6, Ive run out of ideas on how to fix this problem so I would appreciate any help.

Heres the scenario:

I had one big partition with windows XP NTFS filesystem. I resized the partition to be smaller and with the newly unallocated space, created a linux ext2 partition.

I then did a reboot from the "Red Hat 6 installation cd 1 "

I then get this message:

"Kernel panic: Unable to mount root fs on 08:21"

Iam guessing that when the boot happens from the cd, it tries to mount the NTFS parition but fails so I am getting this message. Is this correct ? If so, how do I specify that the linux ext2 partition should be mounted instead ?

I would appreciate any help with the above.

thanks,

Arun

red hat 6 is almost 8 years old. the problem could simply be that it is to old to work with your hardware. even if you get it to work it wouldn't give you a good impression of what linux is like now. you can get most distros free; so you should try something up to date.

Where the hell did you get RH6???
Burn it immediately!

Do not run Linux software that old, it will have more security holes than XP.

Hi guys,

Thanks for the replies. The only reason i used red hat 6 is that its the only one I have and my understanding is that to get a Red Hat distrubutions these days you have to pay for it.. is this correct ?

Can you recommend another Linux version that I can use ? I thought about using Fedora but based on my knowledge from years ago, this is not the most stable OS to use..

So what linux distribution can I use which does not require me to spend weeks learning, installing, configuring etc, I am after something that is very user friendly ?

thanks,

Arun

Fedora Core 6 is not bad, and has some nice features.

Ubuntu is a good distro for beginners, and most things will work "out of the box". The latest version is 6.10, and is a single CD download from www.ubuntu.com.

I hope this helps
--Ian

Wikipedia has an informative article on Redhat history. In brief, in 2003 Redhat decided to concentrate on the corporate market, and they discontinued "Redhat Linux". In its place is Redhat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) which is a non-free, commercial product, but Redhat (the company) also sponsors the Fedora project, which is free. Practically speaking, Fedora Core 6 is today's equivalent to the (discontinued) "Redhat Linux", and it as well as many other distros are available for free download at LQ ISO, distrowatch, and other sites

In any case, don't bother with Redhat 6, it's so old you would only be wasting your time. You might consider trying out several distros to see which best fits your needs and preferences. Good luck with it

Ditto the advice to start with Ubuntu. More generally, anything that uses the Debian packaging system---ie Mepis, PCLinuxOS, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, etc. and of course Debian.

I like Mepis

PCLOS uses rpms.

What about Mandriva?

btw, PCLOS does use RPMs, but it uses apt, like debian.