Chapter Summary
Most installations of Red Hat Linux begin by booting from the first installation CD. When the system boots from the CD, it displays a boot: prompt. You can respond to this prompt with different commands, by pressing RETURN without entering a command, or not at all. In all cases, the system boots Red Hat Linux from the CD. If you are installing from files on the local hard disk or over a network, give the command linux askmethod in response to the boot: prompt:
The program that installs Red Hat Linux is named Anaconda. Anaconda identifies the hardware, builds the filesystems, and installs or upgrades the Red Hat Linux operating system. Anaconda can run in textual or graphical (default) interactive mode or in batch mode (Kickstart). Anaconda does not write to the hard disk until it displays the About to Install screen. Until you see this screen, you can press CONTROL-ALT-DEL to abort the installation without making any changes to the hard disk.
The Disk Druid graphical disk-partitioning program can add, delete, and modify partitions on a hard drive during installation. The fdisk utility reports on and manipulates hard disk partitions before or after installation.
A dual-boot system is one that can boot one of two operating systems, frequently Windows and Linux. The biggest problem in setting up a dual-boot system, assuming you want to add Linux to a Windows system, is finding disk space for Linux.
With the introduction of Fedora Core 2, Red Hat replaced XFree86 with X.org Foundation's X11R6.7.0 X Window System. The X.org X server is functionally equivalent to the one distributed by XFree86 because most of the code is the same. Under X.org, the primary configuration file is named /etc/X11/xorg.conf.
Red Hat Linux uses the GNOME display manager (gdm) to provide a graphical login, even if you are using a KDE desktop. The gdmsetup utility configures the login presented by gdm by editing the /etc/X11/gdm/gdm.conf file.