This Wednesday brings a sort of special guide, it’s a two-parter. This week I’ll be talking about how to install a standard Linux setup. Next week, I’ll be talking about what to do once you’ve installed Linux. I hope you enjoy and please take precautions when installing and playing with Linux. Do not do this to a computer which is holding a harddrive which is holding data which is vital to your life. It will somehow get damaged, I promise. Don’t worry, every great geek was at one time a Linux virgin, well I’m here to deflower you, moving on:

Introduction

Linux – the final frontier, well kind of. Once you’ve hit Linux, there’s no turning back- you’re officially a geek. As many of you may already know, Linux is just about the most tweakable operating system available – you have control over everything. And when I say everything, I mean everything – if you want to add or remove support for a feature from the kernel, all you have to do is change the source and recompile. Having control over everything your computer does is a refreshing thought – and can be extremely rewarding if everything is done right. And even if it isn’t, we learn from our mistakes. I know I have.

In this guide, I am going to describe how to install Linux. The particular distribution I have chosen for this guide is SuSe 9.1. As far as I’ve been able to tell, it is the easiest to install and set up, and as such it makes my life much easier (and it will your’s too, I promise). I would like to encourage you to visit linuxiso.org before proceeding though. They showcase and detail all the most popular distributions of Linux. Even though this guide will focus on SuSe, I encourage you to find whatever distro may suit your needs best.

Pre-installation

Before you even think about installing Linux, you need to find out a few things. Make sure you have some paper handy to write this down. You will need to know the following about your computer:

- Modem Specifics: Type, COM port
- Network Specifics (if any): Type of network, IP Address (DHCP?), make/model of NIC, etc.
- Video Card Make/Model
- Sound Card Make/Model
- Amount of System RAM
- Which hard drives are plugged into which IDE channels (or if you are using SCSI, what address they are using)
- CD/DVD-ROM drive make/model
- Anything else you think might be important (Other hardware settings, etc). This includes ISP settings (DNS server stuff, etc).

The SuSe setup will most definently detect most of your devices, but if you’ve got anything like a TV capture card or some other uncommon hardware device, then you’ll need to make note of it. You may have to take manual steps to get the right drivers installed for it. Also I suggest you read through this entirely so you can familiarize yourself with the steps, and then get the data you need to finish your install.

A few things that are new in 9.1

Linux kernel 2.6
KDE 3.2.1
GNOME 2.4.2
Samba 3
KDevelop 3.0
Gimp 2.0
and a plethora of minor changes.

Since SuSe doesn’t offer free iso download versions of SuSe (anymore), I’m writing this guide on how to do an net install (ftp install) of SuSe 9.1 since that is something that they do offer for free, but don’t offer support. They do offer a “guide” to installing SuSe from the net, but it lacks detail and seems intentionally cryptic to me.

The first thing you need to do is select a place to download the boot.iso from. You can do that by searching here : http://www.suse.com/us/private/download/ftp/int_mirrors.html and selecting the closest location to you. I choose the ftp://mirror.mcs.anl.gov/pub/suse/ (Chicago, IL). When searching for a mirror, it is very important when looking on the SuSe mirrors page to select a COMPLETE mirror. It just saves you headaches.

Once you have a mirror from SuSe open, you can find the directory where the boot.iso resides.
This is different than the other versions. The boot iso WAS in the ftp://mirror.mcs.anl.gov/pub/suse/i386/current/boot/ directory, however this time it’s in the ftp://mirror.mcs.anl.gov/pub/suse/i386/9.1/boot/ (this may be because the mirrors are not completely updated as of this writing, I’m not postitive) The file your looking for is:

boot.iso 23744 KB

Now you can download the boot.iso file. Exact url to the boot iso I used is: ftp://mirror.mcs.anl.gov/pub/suse/i386/9.1/boot/boot.iso This iso file is a few MB’s larger than the older 9.0 boot.iso file.

After you have the boot iso downloaded, burn the boot.iso file as an image to a blank cdr. I won’t go into detail here, but there are many helpful tutorials on the net if you need help with that. Here is a good place to start though: http://www.linuxiso.org/viewdoc.php/howtoburn.html

Next, simply insert the disk into your computer, and reboot. You should be rewarded with a screen that displays some welcome message and then be forwarded on to the boot options screen. At this screen you should be able to choose from Installation

Choose Installation — then hit the enter key.
It will say something like “Can’t find cd - entering manual setup”)
You should get a {Loading Linux Kernel……………} and then proceed to the next screen.

You should get a screen that lets you choose your language and keyboard map…. mine were both English, the defaults.

Then you should get to a MAIN MENU screen. Several options there. Starting with Settings. System Information. Kernel Modules. Start Installation. Exit/Reboot. Power Off.

Choose Settings first. Make sure your Language selection is correct.
Then choose KERNEL MODULES and then select Load network (ethernet) card modules. Choose your network cards modules and load it. It is important that you know what network card you have as this step needs to be correct in order to continue.

If you need to load other modules do so here before proceeding. IE: if you have more than one network card installed, load that module also. When that’s done go back to the main menu and choose START INSTALLATION. Then choose the source medium (NETWORK). Then choose FTP. If you have more than one network card installed, here is where you have to tell the installer which card to use also. Then to enable your card to access the internet you need to choose AUTO CONFIG VIA DHCP or do it manually. I choose auto, since I’m using a router that does DHCP.

Next is the hard part. You have to enter the IP ADDRESS of the FTP server. It took me several trys to figure this out. But after a little research, I found that the IP address can be had via the DIG command on Linux.

You must use the dig command in a terminal to find the IP address of whatever FTP server your using. I was using the ftp://mirror.mcs.anl.gov/pub/suse/ FTP server. Using the dig command : dig mirror.mcs.anl.gov returns one IP address. 140.221.9.138

If you must use windows to get the ip address, try going to some web site, such as http://network-tools.com/ or similar. If you use http://network-tools.com/ select the Express lookup. Simply type in “mirror.mcs.anl.gov” in the blank space just under the first big box of choices on the screen. After pressing “Enter”, it will resolve a traceroute to “140.221.9.138″, and there you have the address. This method works in any browser in any operating system.

Enter this number into the box asking for the IP address. After hitting enter it asks you if you want to specify a username and password, just say no. Then it asks if you want to use a Http proxy. Say NO again.

If things have went right so far it should say “trying to connect to ftp server”. Once connected it says “Please enter the directory on the server”

For the ftp://mirror.mcs.anl.gov/pub/suse/ ftp server the correct entry would be: pub/suse/i386/9.1/

You should then see a small screen that says “Loading data into ramdisk (53300 kB) WOOT….. the hard part of the install, getting connected, is over!!

After that data is downloaded into the RAM disk, you will be greeted with the YaST Installation and System administration program.

The first thing you get to do is choose your language again. Then Yast detects hardware and checks to see if you want to load those drivers/modules. Choosing yes to detected hardware seems like a no brainer to me… so choose yes. The rest of the installation seems fairly straightforward and should be easy. The YaST installer has a very NICE partitioning tool.

At a minimum, you should probably have these partitions.

/boot small 50 mb
swap 500 mb unless you have alot of ram
/root 2+ gigs at least
/home the rest of the hard drive…or dedicate more to other partitions and root.

NOTE: You can let SuSe auto-partition your drive for you. I decided to go that route this time and ended up with a 1 gig swap partition and a 5 gig root partition on my 6 gig test drive. While I’m not sure that’s the best setup, it did work fine. Smile

The net install once it begins does take some time, even with fast connections. My 9.1 install took 1 hour and 15 minutes start to finish using the above method. That’s the fastest I’ve ever done a net install, so I doubt that it was an average time. The servers are alot of time running at full capacity. Your milage may vary of course, and depends on your connection speed, and how busy the mirror is when your doing this. I usually set it up to start downloading the packages right before I go to bed. Plan on it taking at least several hours even on a fast connection. If I were on dialup, personally, I wouldn’t even attempt this type of install. It would be much less painful to just pay for SuSe 9.1 in my local computer store, or “order” it online.

Once the packages are finally downloaded, you get a nice menu with YAST (YetAnotherSetupTool) to choose the different programs you desire to install. Working with Yast and configuring you system are probably the easiest pieces of the Linux install process, Yast and SuSe do a great job of this.

Then it’s time to finish the install, setting root password, users, graphic card settings, and that’s about it. Special note, check your RESOLUTION SETTINGS here carefully, sometimes the installer sets them to high. I usually just change mine back to1280×1024, but you may want different settings. By default the installer usually sets the resolution to it’s HIGHEST possible setting for the graphics card/monitor combination, sometimes this results in makeing the monitor run out of sync. Reboot and you get rewarded with a SuSe 9.1 Linux Desktop workstation !! I’m very impressed with the ease of use of the SuSe enviroment. I look forward to using it more and more.

On another side note, if you have several computers that you want to install this to, you can download the entire directory tree and do this install from your own network. (That to is beyond the scope of this article, but isn’t to difficult to do.) This would be much quicker than installing via ftp from a remote server every time. I don’t see much benefit to downloading the entire tree if your just going to install this on one machine though.

Things you might want to write down BEFORE you start the install:

1. The ftp mirror URL.
2. The boot iso url.
3. The IP address of the ftp server your using.
4. The directory address on the ftp server.
5. The names/model #’s of your network (ethernet) cards.
6. If you don’t use dhcp for your network you may need.

Static Network Address:
Subnet Mask:
Gateway/Router Address:
ISP primary DNS server address:

Main Download Page: http://www.suse.com/us/private/download/suse_linux/index.html
SuSe Mirrors Page: http://www.suse.com/us/private/download/ftp/int_mirrors.html