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This chapter covers:
Now that you have the perfect PC for running Linux, it’s time to prepare for the installation. No, you can’t just install Linux from the accompanying CD-ROMs; you must first configure your hard drive and create boot floppies. Neither step is particularly difficult. Here, we’ll cover how to create boot floppies for booting Linux, followed by a discussion of preparing your hard drive for the Linux installation. The actual installation process is:
In the following steps, we’re assuming you already have an Intel-based PC up and running with the MS-DOS operating system, with the CD-ROM drive installed correctly, because you’ll need to copy some files from the CD-ROM onto your hard drive. (On a PC, you’ll need to install special drivers to use the CD-ROM drive; these drivers ship with the CD-ROM drive.) This doesn’t need to be the PC on which you plan to install Linux—it just needs to be a PC with a DOS command line and access to the CD-ROM drive.
NOTE: The procedures in this chapter are closely tied to the installation and configuration routines found on the accompanying CD-ROMs. Other distributions of Linux are not exactly the same. If you’re using a distribution of Linux other than the Slackware distribution on the accompanying CD-ROMs, you can still follow along, keeping in mind that your exact steps may differ.
Your first steps will be to create two floppy disks used to boot Linux: the boot and root diskettes. The boot diskette is the diskette used (as the name implies) to boot the PC, while the root diskette contains a set of Linux commands (actually, a complete mini-Linux system). Creating these disks is probably the best way to install Linux, although it is possible to install Linux without using any floppy disks using LOADLIN.EXE, a DOS program that loads Linux from an MS-DOS prompt. We’ll cover this option a little later, but unless your floppy disk doesn’t work under Linux it is recommended that you install using a bootdisk and a rootdisk.
Your next step is to determine which bootdisk and rootdisk images you’ll be using and writing the images onto formatted floppy disks. Because selecting the disk images to use (especially the bootdisk) can be a relatively large task, it warrants its own section.
Linux needs to know a lot about your PC’s hardware, and that knowledge begins the second you boot the system. That’s why you need to put some thought into selecting your bootdisk and rootdisk images.
Before we go any further, we should explain what bootdisk and rootdisk images are. Linux needs to boot from floppies initially, and it needs to know what sort of hardware it’s working with. When you boot Linux for the first time, the information is contained on the bootdisk and rootdisk. To create a bootdisk and a rootdisk, you need to select the proper image. You’ll then use the RAWRITE.EXE utility to copy the image byte-for-byte to the diskette.
How do you select the proper image? The first step is to determine the disk size of your drive A:, which you boot the system from. If you’re using a 3.5-inch disk drive as A:, you’ll need to grab an image from the bootdsks.144 directory. (This is so labeled because the capacity of a 3.5-inch high-density floppy is 1.44 megabytes.) If you’re using a 5.25-inch disk drive to boot from, you’ll need to grab an image from the bootdsks.12 directory. (This is so labeled because the capacity of a 5.25-inch high-density floppy is 1.2 megabytes.)
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