7.2 Installation procedure
System boot of the laptop
As explained earlier, the laptop has a bootable DVD drive, so that's it.
System boot of desktop machines
So, I made a 'network' bootable floppy and booted the first Vectra VL420 (intended to be a Linux server) with it. After a while, it came to a point to choose the installation method (NFS or FTP or HTTP server). At first, I wanted to use the second 'spare' HTTP server on the other Vectra, but regardless of what permission I tried to give to the 'Everyone' group of Windows users, I always got the following answer from the Linux setup:
Error: Couldn't get file ... (or something like that)
Then I tried to use the 'spare' FTP server from the second Vectra and, at first, it also asked for local and remote IP addresses. That time successfully, it started to load a part of the remote Linux files into its memory without any complaint. Soon after, it came to the very same position as Omnibook 6000 did: it got directly to the installation menu, asking a user to choose a language for the installation use.
>From that point, the setup process was almost the same...
I have chosen/confirmed the following items:
- a language to use, besides English(American) as default: I added Unicode and Serbian (both Cyrillic and Latin) ; - a mouse and keyboard; - a security level - I accepted defaults: 'Standard' for laptop and 'Higher' for server;
The next important task was to choose one of DrakX partitioning options:
- for laptop I chose the 'Use the free space on the Windows partition', because the laptop has one IDE hard disk and I wanted it to use a part of it for Linux (besides existing Windows 2000 Prof. already installed). Windows' Disk Management reported:
Disk 0 15 MB FAT (HP Diagnostics or like)
7.13 GB FAT32 (C: "HPNOTEBOOK")
20.80 GB Free space
The two partitions (FAT & FAT32) were made during the installation procedure, using HP's supplied installation CD's.
At the first moment, Linux setup complained that my Windows partition "was too fragmented" and required me to reboot under Windows, run the "defrag" utility, then restart the Mandrake Linux installation. The defragmentation process have taken cca. 1.5 hour to be completed! When restarted the setup, it wanted to use 7.13 GB Windows partition, instead of 20.80 GB. I chose to 'Use the free space'. Then it made partitions for Linux: /dev/hda5 and /dev/hda7.
- for Vectra VL420 I used 'Custom disk partitioning' because there I had two SCSI disks, one of them running Windows 2000 Server already installed, and the other one I wanted to use entirely for a Linux server. BTW, I wasn't sure what the option 'Erase entire disk' would do during its next step (erase a whole disk or a partition?), although it also may be the proper solution too. DrakX recognized the two SCSI disks as sda and sdb and I chose sdb to install Linux. The first step was to 'Clear all' and after that to 'Auto allocate' the space on that second disk. Finally, after a 'Done' it appeared to make /dev/sdb1 and /dev/sdb6 Linux partitions.
Package Group Selection
Per default, the Mandrake 9.1 setup offers the following to be installed:
- Office Workstation
- Internet Workstation
- KDE Workstation
- Gnome Workstation
that is in sum: Total size 1010/5267 (at laptop) and 1066/5265 (at server).
- for laptop I added all that was available, excepting 6 'Server' items (1612/5267),
- for server I added all that was available, including 6 'Server' items (1708/5265).
Then I got an info, related to selecting following servers (?) on laptop:
cups, postfix, rwho, webmin
and on server box:
cups, openssh-server, postfix, proftpd, rwho, webmin, ypserv, bind and nfs-utils.
Although I was confused about the 'servers' to be installed on a laptop, I have accepted those things to be installed,
* License
