Finishing Installation

Once your installation is finished, you can click the Exit button to reboot. Be sure to remove the install or boot floppy disk first, or any CD-ROM. If you booted from a CD, your CD will be ejected before rebooting. If you booted directly from the CD-ROM, you may want to change your boot sequence in your BIOS back to your original settings.

Setup

The first time you start up Red Hat or Fedora Linux, the Setup Agent is run. This agent will help you perform basic configuration of your system, letting you set the date and time, configure your sound card, as well as set up user accounts. For Fedora, you will be initially asked to approve the GNU General Public License for this distribution.

Date and Time

The Date And Time Configuration panel will automatically probe for the date and time, displaying the date on a calendar and the time in hours, minutes, and seconds. You can easily change any entry with the click of a button. You can also choose to use the Network Time Protocol, which will obtain the time automatically from a time server on the Internet, making sure your time is always correct. You can choose from servers listed like clock.redhat.com.

User Account

The User Accounts panel will then let you create a normal user account for administrative uses. A dialog box is displayed with entries for the username, the user's full name, the password, and the password confirmation. Once you have entered in the information and clicked NEXT, the new user will be listed. You can also select Kerberos or NIS to configure a user's network login process. This starts up authconfig and lets you configure NIS and LDAP. On the Authentication panel, you can configure LDAP, and Kerberos and SMB (samba). You can enable and configure support for each, specifying NIS, LDAB, Kerberos, or SMB servers that your network may use.

Sound Configuration

On the Sound panel, your sound card will be automatically detected and configured. You can click a button to test the sound.

Red Hat Network (Red Hat Linux only)

The Red Hat Update Agent is then run to register you with the Red Hat Network so that you can automatically update the installed software on your system. Currently, access to the Red Hat Network is limited to subscribed customers, though you can register for a demo account, providing limited access. Free access is not provided. If you are using the DVD-ROM provided with this book, or if you downloaded Red Hat from a distribution site, you will need to register for the Red Hat Network Basic Service or for a demo account. If you do not wish to register at this time, you can skip to the next panel. If you purchased Red Hat, you can activate access at this time. If you previously registered, you can log in using your current username and password. The update agent will detect your system's hardware configuration and generate a profile that you can register.

Installing Additional Software

You can then elect to install specific software from your DVD-ROM (or CD-ROMs if you are using them instead). For the DVD-ROM, the Installation button will give you full access to all packages. At this time, you will not be able to use the DVD-ROM to install Documentation. This must be done manually, after you have finished installation. However, if you have the Documentation CD-ROM, you could install from it now.

Login and Logout

The Setup Agent then concludes and your login screen is displayed. The login prompt or the login screen will appear, depending on whether or not you chose to have the X Window System start up automatically. You can then log into your Linux system using a login name and a password for any of the users you have set up. If you log in as the root user, you can perform administrative operations, such as installing new software or creating more users. To log in as the root user, enter root at the login prompt and the root user password at the password prompt.

On the login screen, four pop-up menus are displayed in the lower-left corner: Language, Session, Reboot, and Shutdown. The Session menu lets you choose what desktop graphical interface to use, such as KDE or GNOME. You use the Shutdown menu to shut down and the Reboot menu to reboot the system. The Language menu lets you select a language to use.

When you finish, you can shut down your system. If you are using a command line interface, use the command halt. From GNOME, you can elect to shut down the entire system. If you log out from either GNOME or KDE and return to the login screen, you can choose the shutdown entry from the Session pop-up menu located at the bottom of the screen. If the system should freeze on you for any reason, you can hold down the CTRL and ALT keys and press DEL (CTRL-ALT-DEL) to safely restart it. Never just turn it off. You can also use CTRL-ALT-F3 to shift to a command line prompt and login to check out of your system, shutting down with the halt command.

When you boot normally, if you choose to use the GRUB boot loader, a GRUB menu will be displayed listing Linux and other operating systems you specified, such as Windows. Use the arrow keys to move to the Linux entry, if it is not already highlighted, and press ENTER.

Boot Disks

If you want copies of your floppy boot disk in case you lose or damage the one you made during installation, you can create more with the mkbootdisk command. Enter this command in a terminal window or at the command line, and specify the version number of the kernel, as shown here:

mkbootdisk 2.4.18-14

You can also create boot disks from the GNOME desktop using the qmkbootdisk tool. This tool also lets you specify different kernels to boot (see Chapter 33). The current kernel will already be selected.

You can use mkbootdisk to create boot CD-ROMs instead of boot floppy disks. Use the --iso option and the --device option with the name of an ISO image file to create. You then use CD-ROM-burning software to create the CD-ROM from the image file. The following example creates an CD-ROM image file called mybootcd.iso that can be used as a boot CD-ROM.

mkbootdisk --iso --device mybootcd.iso  2.4.18-14

If for some reason you are not able to boot or access your system, it may be due to conflicting configuration, libraries, or applications. In this case, you can boot your Linux system in a rescue mode and then edit configuration files with a text editor such as Vi (see Chapter 11), remove the suspect libraries, or reinstall damaged software with RPM (see Chapter 29). To enter the rescue mode, boot from your floppy boot disk, your CD-ROM, or the DVD-ROM included with this book. At the boot prompt, enter:

linux rescue

You will boot into the command line mode with your system's files mounted at /mnt/sysimage. Use the cd command to move between directories (see Chapter 10). Check /mnt/sysimage/etc and /mnt/sysimage/etc/sysconfig for your configuration files. You can use Vi to edit your files. To reinstall files, use the rpm command (see Chapter 4). When you are finished enter the exit command.

Note

If, while running Linux, you wish to open the DVD-ROM included with this book, you can insert it in your DVD-ROM drive. If a file manager window does not then open automatically, you can right-click on the desktop and select CD-ROM from Disks entry in the drop-down menu to open it manually.