This may not be of much use to those of you who dread text based installs, and those in the know, but a bit of useful information I came across when I installed Red Hat Linux 9 recently.To install Red Hat Linux 9, you do not really need to burn the iso image to a CD, neither do you need to go through a lengthy process of extracting the contents of the iso image and setting up an installation directory for a hard drive based install. I am sure some people’s eyes are popping out at this stage. You are in good company if you are in this group.
What you have to do is extract the redhat boot diskette and rawwritewin from the first iso. use rawritewin to create a boot diskette. The correct image filename for this install type is bootdisk.img.
You are now good to go.
Reboot the system and start the system using the boot diskette. You will come to a screen where it tells you to choose an install method. Choose the most appropriate for you, but in my experience, the default, i.e. press return, will work just fine.
It then asks you for the install medium type, and you select iso from harddrive. It then asks you to type the location of the iso files on your hard drive. needless to say, it mounts FAT partitions automatically then, so should not have a problem. It show you the paths it has mounted them. After you select the directory with the files, whose names must include disc1, disc2 and disc3, it is mostly downhill. The catch is that you do not have the nice Graphical install. The good news is, the installation is very much the same without the graphicaal goodies. You can even leave the package selection for later when you boot into the system for the first time. To do this, just select Personal computer, or something like that and you get a good working configuration which you can tweak later.
Did I mention that this way, your system installs much faster, (because the iso is on a much faster medium, the hard disk).
After booting into Redhat, you can run redhat-config-packages with the isodir switch as follows,
# redhat-config-packages –isodir=”/path/to/your/redhat/images/”
and you will fire up the Add/Remove Packages application of Red Hat. It will install all the packages from the cd’s without problems.
For other options for redhat-config-packages, just type
# redhat-config-packages –help
and you will get the list of options/switches you can use.
Just information I thought was a bit difficult to come by and I thought I would share it.
And, oh by the way, you can always mount the iso’s as directories using the mount command as follows,
# mount -t iso9660 -o loop /path/to/image.iso /path/to/mount/point
Or something like that if I made a typo. Newbies might find that useful information.
I think Red Hat is doing quite a good job with its tools, and I think they should be forgiven for not giving us a general package manager. But theirs has quite a few tricks up its sleave. I now have a linux installation fully running without needing to burn some CD’s.
And oh, it helps to have a huge hard drive anyway. With a large hard drive you can keep the iso’s on your hard drive too. No need to worry about your cd’s not being returned anymore.
I agree, it IS a nifty thing. About two days ago, one of my Linux boxen refused to boot up after updating the kernel because I had upgraded modutils to use the module tools for the 2.6 dev kernel. I tried booting off of the bootdisk.iso image on CD and did a “linux rescue” only to find I needed the CDs. After searching the Net for a bit, I found out that pointing the installation program to a directory containing the ISO images would be sufficient as a rescue image. So I NFS exported my ISO images subdirectory, and, et voila! I’m dropped into a rescue shell.
Good job, RedHat techs!
Yeah thanks for that, I don’t like reading manuals, and reading something like what you wrote is always helpful.
This is off topic but it doesn’t seem like a busy thread.
An article id really like to see is one where you can make custom cd’s using some tool supplied by RH, I saw one like it somewhere but forgot.
In other words add all your updated packages, apt-get, config files, MP3. If there is a way to upgrade your distro by putting in a new apt-get URL that would be pretty cool, same cd to install every new release. while still having that crisp feeling of an unclutterd box after 6 months of usage.
I was hoping that this article would show how to install RedHat from source rpms or build it with vanilla gnome, X or something.
You can achieve a very this arimilar effect to what this article suggests if you install from NFS.
Those are things I would like to see too in future tutorial style articles.
But lets thank the author for teaching us newbies something that could be useful for us in future.
Imagine that you download the iso’s yet you have only one blank CD left.
You do a minimal install with disc 1, and mount the rest of the iso, and install the rest. Therefore it was a good article.
An article id really like to see is one where you can make custom cd’s using some tool supplied by RH, I saw one like it somewhere but forgot.
You can include custom rpm’s into your install by using the redhat kickstart utility (used to automate part or all of the install process). You can also use it to run scripts before or after your install.
If you want to build a custom cd you can use it. A nice article on how to do this can be found at : http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=6473
I started installing mandrake on my system with this method when it was on 7.2. It was a successful install minus the x server. I imagine that redhat has had this feature for a long while as well. The only problem with this method is setting it up from a NTFS partition is unlikely. For all of you that dual boot WinXP or Win2K good, good luck using this method.
Glad to see a RH9 topic come up so soon. I bought and installed RH9 on my Athlon 1000 box yesterday afternoon and with the distro itself I am very impressed – Bluecurve gives the kind of application appearance consistency previously only seen on Mac or windows
it all just worked.
The only problem is that compatibility with some software is broken because they’re using GBLIB2.3 and NPTL threads backported to kernel 2.4.20 from the 2.5 dev series ( no I don’t know what these are or why nothing now works )
Does anyone know when RPM builds of WINE for RH9 will be available? As a new convert from Windows this is a much needed application. According to Sourceforge you need a version for GLIBC 2.3 but they don’t seem to offer one for download…
GBLIB should be GLIBC
Yes, NTFS throws a spanner into the works, but I don’t do NTFS anymore. I am prepared to pay a little performance penalty for that, but FAT32 enables me to use all my hard drives with Linux and Windows without any problems at all. I would like to switch my “Data” partition to something else, but would still like it accessible from DOS for when I have to ghost from a diskette. So FAT32 for now I guess.
I am glad people some people found the article helpful. I also got this information from others so I am just passing it along “The Linux Way”.
I had this problem too, and reported it to bugs.winehq.
apparently some ppl have been able to get it to work with the new build when they configure –with-nptl. I haven’t.
There are packages available. Details at the link below.
http://www.winehq.com/index.php?issue=170#NPTL%20Auto%20Det…
Many thanks for the help on here and by email re WINE on RH9 – I can confirm that the RPMs for 9.0 will install – but unfortunately trying to run a Windows app known to be WINE compatible ( Trillian 0.74 ) froze the system irrecoverably every time I tried to move a Window, and the IE5 installer kept crashing
/user/chris will wait for the official WINE release for this platform before trying this again.
You can use Power Quest Drive Image + NTFS drives…
Is it possible to make a kickstart floppy that look for the ISO images on a NFS Server ?
You mentioned some issues with Trillian. Is that a multi-standard instand messaging app?
If that’s true, try Gaim. It comes with RH 9, and it works quite well with ICQ, AIM/AOL, MSN and Yahoo (ICQ and AOL became the same protocol recently, so you must use the same Gaim module for both).
If you wish, you can get a newer, significantly improved version of it from here:
http://freshrpms.net/
Freshrpms also has many neat packages built specifically for Red Hat. If one of those packages requires something else to be installed previously (has a “dependecy”), that dependency is always solved either by another Freshrpms package or by a package in the Red Hat installer CD.
If you go ahead and do it “the Freshrpms way” and install apt, then the dependency issues will disappear (apt takes care of all dependencies for you).