F8
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 8. But, for the sake of completeness, I've included one
here. If you need additional help, I suggest that you either
read
Stanton
Finley's (now quite dated) or Mauriat
Miranda's web pages about installing Fedora Core/Fedora
systems, although Stanton
Finley mentioned as of Fedora Core 6 that he has
jumped ship from Fedora over to Ubuntu. :( (If you
haven't read it already, you may want to look at my Fedora
vs. Ubuntu page.)
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 couple of 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 as of Fedora 8:
Fedora Core and Fedora Extras have 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 8, 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
