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Our only advice: Don’t be stingy when it comes to Linux hard disk allocation, and remember that Linux applications tend to eat up a lot of disk space. It’s not unusual to run across freely available binaries on the Internet that are more than a megabyte (such as the popular Web browser NCSA Mosaic for X Window), and in time these applications add up. If you’re really careful during installation and you install only the applications you need, you can keep a Linux installation down to 100 megabytes or so. Realistically, however, by the time you include everything worth having, you’ll be up to 275 megabytes or so. If you only have a 325MB hard disk, you’ll obviously need to keep the DOS partition to 10 or so megabytes.
Don’t bother with any other partitions—at least for Linux usage. You probably won’t want to create a logical DOS drive; if you do, you can’t use it for a Linux installation, as all Linux partitions must be created through Linux later in the installation process.
After deciding how much hard disk space to give to DOS, you’ll want to exit FDISK. Go ahead and make the DOS partition active (this means that you can boot from it later, which you’ll want to do; you can have multiple partitions able to boot).
After quitting FDISK, reboot the system, leaving the DOS diskette in drive A:. You’ll now want to format drive C:—at least the DOS portion of it—with the DOS FORMAT command:
A> FORMAT /S C:
This command formats the DOS partition with the core of the operating system (the COMMAND.COM, IO.SYS, and MSDOS.SYS files). The FORMAT command makes sure that you want to go ahead with the format (this is to make sure that DOS neophytes don’t accidentally format a partition that contains valuable information); answer in the affirmative when asked if you want to proceed with the format.
NOTE: You can use any version of DOS for these steps, as long as it’s DOS 4.0 or better. DOS doesn’t care if you format the hard drive with one version of DOS and install another version later.
Now that you’ve prepared the DOS side of your hard disk (and after looking back you realize that it’s a lot easier than the extended verbiage in the previous sections made it seem), it’s time to boot Linux.
When preparing a PC for use with OS/2 and Linux, you’ll need to use a slightly different route for preparing your hard drive.
OS/2 has trouble with partitions not originally created with its FDISK utility. Therefore, you must start by partitioning your hard disk with the OS/2 FDISK utility (keeping in mind that OS/2 needs more than 35 megabytes of hard disk space to run). Then you must create the Linux partition with the OS/2 FDISK utility—marked as another OS/2 partition—and make that a potential boot partition using OS/2’s Boot Manager. (OS/2 gives you the ability to select a boot partition every time you boot the PC.)
You’ll then boot your PC with the instructions given next. However, later in the process you’ll do something a little different when it comes to the Linux fdisk command (which we’ll cover at that point in the installation process).
Obviously, you boot Linux with the bootdisk you prepared earlier. Put it in your boot drive and restart your PC with a cold or warm boot (it doesn’t matter).
Initially your PC will do the things that it normally does when it boots, such as check the memory and run through the BIOS. However, the word LILO will appear on your screen, followed by a full screen that begins with the line:
Welcome to the Slackware Linux 3.2.0 bootkernel disk!
You’ll also see some verbiage about passing parameters along to the kernel; most users won’t need to pass along any additional parameters.
WARNING: The exceptions are some IBM PS/1, ValuePoint, and ThinkPad users, as Linux will not recognize the hard disks used by these machines. These IBM computers don’t store the hard disk information in the CMOS, which is checked by Linux upon booting up. Because Linux lacks this information, it assumes there’s no hard drive present. You must pass along the hard disk geometry at this point.If you are using one of these machines, you cannot use the bare bootdisk; instead, you should use scsi. When you boot using this bootdisk, you should press down the left Shift key, which gives you a menu where you can specify the geometry of the hard disk. Where do you get this information? From the drive’s installation guide or by checking the machine’s internal setup.
Most users will be able to press the Enter key and proceed to load the Linux RAM disk.
NOTE: There are some cases where LILO appears on the screen and the system hangs or rows of 0s and 1s cascade down the screen. In these cases, you are probably using the wrong bootdisk for your PC. The first thing to do is to create a few alternate bootdisks and try them; if the problem persists, scan the Usenet newsgroups and the FTP archives (see Appendix A for details) to make sure that your PC and its peripherals are indeed supported by Linux.
The bootdisk runs through your system hardware, noting which hard drives and peripherals are present and scouting out other salient details about your PC. It’s at this point that Linux discovers any problems with your PC, and if you have problems installing or using Linux, it’s a place you’ll want to check. (The same information is displayed and gathered every time you boot.)
If there are no problems, you can put in your rootdisk and press Enter. A core of the Linux operating system is then copied to the RAM disk, which then gives you access to some Linux commands, including the important fdisk command. The installation process instructs you to login the Linux system as root:
slackware login : root
There will be no password required.
WARNING: If you’re asked for a password, it means you don’t have enough memory to install.
NOTE: Before you proceed, carefully look through the instructions on the screen. There are a few notes that may apply to your specific computing situation.
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