Objective: Install Linux "on my own". I had sort of installed Linux on a plausible machine (plausible from the standpoint of CPU speed, amount of memory, disk space) at a meeting of the Suncoast Linux User Group (charming acronym: SLUG). A couple of helpful people guided me through it, but the process didn't allow me to mull over each step and let me fix what happened in my brain.

Rather than wipe it out, I decided to try putting it on a machine with a 40 MHz 386 motherboard. I brought memory on that machine up to 16 mb and hard disk space to 540 mb. The video card had 1 mb of video RAM, and there was a CD ROM drive and an AHA1520 SCSI card to handle it. I had Red Hat Linux, version 5.1. A mantra of Linux types is that it will install on hardware like this. Ought to work.

Did work.

Did it go to completion first time? Of course not. There was stuff to figure out beforehand. I had tried installing with a 170 MB hard disk, but it ran out of space. That was when I bought a used Connor 540 MB hard disk. I also put in a 120 MB Maxtor hard disk to be used for the Linux Swap partition, but it didn't get recognized when partitioning took place, even though it was recognized by the BIOS at boot up. That has been the only disappointment so far.

The installation process: You have to experience it for yourself, of course. I put the boot diskette in A: and the CD in the CD-ROM drive and turned the power on. The first screen shows up! A morale booster. Then screen after screen. What you do for several screens is obvious and simple minded. Then comes the one entitled "Disk Setup", the choices being Disk Druid and FDISK. A legend tells you that Disk Druid does partitioning and setting up mount points and is usually easier to use than FDISK so I chose it. The next screen to show up, entitled "Current Disk Partitions", and its derivatives are all important.

In the middle of the screen is the legend "Disk Summaries". If you have just one hard disk, just below the first header it reads "hda". (If you have two, the second line would read "hdb"; a single SCSI drive would read hdsa, etc.) The second header is "Geom [C/H/S]". The entry is something like "[866/15/26]", meaning 866 cylinders, 15 heads and 26 sectors. Note that the drive geometry was autodetected! These numbers pertained to the 170 MB hard disk that was abandoned in favor of a 540 MB drive.

The third column header is "Total". Below it is 164 M. The fourth column is "Used". At one point it was 162 M. Then came the column "Free", below which was 2 M. The last column is untitled. Below it was [######## ], roughly indicating percentage occupied.

The top of the screen has a line of column headers reading "Mount Point", "Device", "Requested", "Actual" and "Type". There are as many lines as there are partitions. Initially the "Mount Point" column is blank. The "Device" column might contain entries like "hda1", "hda5" "hda6", etc. In other words, there may be skips. The "Requested" and "Actual" columns are filled with partition sizes. It isn't clear to me what would have to happen for the two columns not to be identical. The last column must show at least one "Linux native", and there has to be one "Linux swap".

Along the bottom is a line of five push buttons. What they are used for is obvious.

Initially the first partition is highlighted, selected and active and the first disk drive is highlighted and selected. I'm not going to try to describe every keystroke you can take, many of which will lead you to a dead end. Do enter and key in the mount point. I do not yet comprehend what would be a good partitioning scheme, but I took the easy way out and designated one mount point only, the root -- "/". The installation takes care of everything, but if anything goes wrong, everything goes wrong disk-wise. I also made a 32 MB swap partition. I would have used the entire second drive had installation recognized it. A bit of arcana: the largest allowable swap partition is 127 MB, one MB less than 128. (Don't ask.)

I didn't install a modem, a GUI and TCP/IP. Later. I did install X Windows, in which programs can be run from the command prompt. In that manner multitasking can proceed. There are two GUIs, KDE and GNOME. Red Hat didn't include either in version 5.1 and also didn't in version 5.2, which is now out. However, GNOME is almost certain to be included in version 6.0, which is expected to be out by midsummer.

Tip about attending a SLUG meeting: There are two meetings a month. One is on the second Wednesday of the month at Thomas Jefferson High School. In addition to a conflict with our own TPCUG meeting, the meeting room is a long distance away from where you park, so bringing your computer is very inconvenient unless you have a cart to tote everything. The other meeting is on the fourth Saturday of the month (5th Saturday in January) at the Dunedin Public Library, at 9 am. An early start, but otherwise much better. u