I'm going to try and setup a redhat server over here, my main goal is to have the system boot WinME, Win2K, and Redhat. Now I have never really used Linux before (Tried Mandrake once) so I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing....and since I don't know much about programming, apparently it may be a little harder for me.

So I just felt that I would take you guys on the journey with me, let you know what I'm doing, and if at that step there are any tips/hints you can give me, that'd be awesome!

So anyways, where I'm at right now, I'm actually downloading the ISO's for Redhat 7.1. CD 1 finished last night, CD 2 should be finished sometime today around 2:30PM EST or so. Once I'm done that I'll throw em onto 2 CD's and try for the install.

Now one thing, if anybody has actually installed Linux to run with Windows, I would appreciate your help as to how to get everything running. I already know now not to do the auto partition (I will be installing in server mode.....or should I do custom mode?) otherwise it will override the MBR. So what do you recommend?

Also, in terms of partitions.....Right now there are 2 (one for Win2k, one for WinME), how do you recommend setting that up, and how much space to set aside?

Remember, I'm trying to build a webserver here.

Any help from you Linux guru's would be one step beyond awesome

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ActiveTuning - Partner & Director Of Sales & Marketing

I've done this plenty of times before, Dave. The easiest setup I've found is to use NT's bootloader to manage the whole mess. The only problems that really come into play are potential 1024 cylinder limitations, but depending on how Red Hat reads your disk, this might not be a problem.

First off, FAT32 will need to be your first partition. You'll prolly want to make your Linux partitions after this point, and then make Win2K last. You can have up to four primary partitions on one disk, or three primary and one extended with numerous logical partitions on it. WinME *MUST* be the on the active primary partition, or it'll complain.

You'll also need this special program I have at home. I downloaded it following a chain of links from the FreeBSD FAQ, but the author's page seems to have been swept away, as was the file. It read/writes the MBR or the boot sector of a disk to/from a file. You can use this to write the Linux bootloader (NOT LILO!) to a 512 byte file, and then add that to the boot.ini file that Win2K will create. Just add another line under the boot options like this :

C:\mbr.dat = "Red Hat Linux"

I'll post more details once I can get the file uploaded.

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"And knowing is half the battle!"

I believe the newest versions of LILO no longer have the 1024 limit.

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paul@pleaseohpleasedontspamme.slcentral.com
A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems -- P. Erdos

That's true...but if I remember correctly (And I'm too lazy to go do some fact checking), none of the recent distros include the newest LILO, so that's great news, but it's only important after the fact, or if someone includes it in their new distribution. Red Hat 7.1, to my knowledge, has the older LILO that doesn't support cylinders >1023. RH 8 should.

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"And knowing is half the battle!"

Just one issue.....like I said before, Win2K and WinME are already installed......

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ActiveTuning - Partner & Director Of Sales & Marketing

Do you by any chance have a second hard disk to put in there? That'd make things a CINCH.

Will Linus boot off a second hard drive?

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Serious Soldier

Heh...Linus might not, but Linux will. I'm not sure about grub or lilo, but since he's already got Win2K and ME installed, he can just install Linux on the third disk, put the MBR bootloader on that disk, and then use the BOOT utility I have to extract it and copy it to the hard disk. It should work. And even if it didn't, I'm pretty sure grub supports that.

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"And knowing is half the battle!"

Heh.. I remember back when I was trying to setup a dualboot with 2k server + linux.. god.. it was a nightmare..

Ryan

Here is that MBR extractor I was talking about. Just run it as
BOOT /?
and it will give you the command line options. For most of you, you'll be using it as BOOT /R /DRIVE:0 MBR A:\MBR.DAT or something like that. I'll elaborate more on its operation in a few minutes.

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"And knowing is half the battle!"

Well....I ended up just wiping everything and installing dedicated red hat.

I set it up in a server config.

Now, does anybody have any tips as to setting up a web server with Apache/PHP/MySQL?

I believe Apache is already on there as I did see some config files for it, although I couldn't find the program.

I thought that maybe it runs automatically but opening up Netscape and going to http://localhost or http://127.0.0.1 or my IP address don't bring anything up.

Any tips or resources would be appreciated.

BTW, for anybody interested in installing Redhat, wow, installation is a breeze, they really made it so much better, and I love the graphical interface in the install.

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ActiveTuning - Partner & Director Of Sales & Marketing

Yup.. they've definitely improved it..

In terms of going to the local site.. if I remember right it was just running by default after I installed.. however if it isn't.. try running "/etc/rc.d/init.d/httpd start" to make sure it's running. If not.. it will start it. If it gives you errors.. check the httpd.conf file for misconfig.. (I can help you through that if you like as well.. )

Ryan

isn't apache usually installed in the /usr/local/apache directory? At least that's where it installs default on the server I'm using. php should also be in /usr/local/lib/php, and mysql in /usr/local/mysql, at least that's how mine setup. If i'm not mistaken i think php is included in the apache release as a module, but mysql I'm not sure about. If it's not there, it's easy enough to download the latest rpm and install it. the command ps -alf will pretty much display a list of all the current running processes so you can see what you've got setup. You should kill any non essential process or things you don't want running like mail, telnet or things like that if you're not using them.

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SystemLogic.net - Editor

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More people are killed annually by donkeys than die in air crashes.

Well.. the location of apache varies through each installation.. (the file I mentioned to use to restart apache is one of the common things throughout almost all distros..)



Umm.. that might not be what you're looking to do.. as that's only a one time fix. If you actually disable the service from starting up at boottime, that will keep the services from starting. In RH you can do this by running "setup" and then the option that talks about services (forget how it's worded..).. it's a nice console interface to managing the services.

Enjoy

Ryan

What about in Linux in general? Aren't startup processes supposed to be in /etc/rc.conf? I can't remember offhand.