F11
Installation
These days,
installing Fedora is
a piece of cake. There was a wee bit of
trouble back with Fedora Core 2, like not being
able to boot into your Windows Partition
(many found this to be a feature, not
a bug — LOL), but those problems
are pretty much a thing of the past. And life is certainly a
lot
simpler with the graphical installer anaconda,
compared to the old RedHat 6.2'ish days, when only a text-based
installer was available. As a result, I feel a bit
silly actually writing out an installation procedure for
Fedora 11. But, for the sake of completeness, I've included one
here. If you need additional help, I suggest that you read Mauriat
Miranda's web pages about installing Fedora Core/Fedora
systems.
There is one point that I disagree with Mauriat
Miranda about,
though,
and that is
whether or not to install everything. I do, even though he wrote an
entire blog about not doing it a few years ago,
entitled: Pitfalls
to Installing Everything.
In response to the blog, things have changed a bit
from Fedora
Core 5 onward (many programs were shifted over to Fedora Extras, which
was then enabled by default via yum),
and considerably more so as of Fedora 7 since
Fedora Core and Fedora Extras have finally merged into "Fedora". In
addition, even if you "Install Everything", not really
everything
is installed. In Fedora Core 4, "Install Everything" meant
about
7 GB of programs were dumped into /usr. As of
Fedora Core 5 through Fedora 11, it's about half that.
The main reason for not being hyper selective about what I do
or do not
install is that, as a Professor, I use Linux for my day-to-day work
because it increases productivity and provides the
engineering tools I need to be effective in my teaching and
research. I do not consider myself to be a "true"
Systems Administrator (and am certainly not being paid to be one), so I
simply don't have time to go hunting for
some random development package (even if it is with yum)
to be able to use or install a particular program. Secondly,
I like to see what
is fully available at my "fingertips" from the get go, so that
if I
do need to learn a new piece of software (such as when yum
and selinux
were first introduced to Fedora), I can learn it quickly.
Thirdly, how else is a newbie going to learn vi or emacs,
unless its available from the beginning?
They'll probably never touch it, otherwise
— habits
form
quickly. Security is probably the biggest argument against
installing everything, but seeing as I'm sitting behind 3 firewalls
(University, College, and my own), I am probably not as "at
risk"
as others may be. Are these arguments weak?
Possibly.
But the wonderful thing about Linux is that provides a user
freedom to choose.
2. Installation
2.1
Installation
Procedure
2.2 First Boot
