Linux Install

Geek Warning: This is another geeky post. If that isn’t your thing, please feel free to move on to a different entry or come back soon. I promise to have a baby picture up soon!

When last we left the web server project I had decided on using Apache and Linux to host my website on a computer in my office/lab. With that decision out of the way I set off to find some install disks for Linux.

Ubuntu was my first stop. It’s the distro that I’ve had the most experience with so I figured I would have at least a small head start on understanding what I was doing. I dug out my CDs, opened a beer and set off for my “lab”. And by “lab” I mean a half bath at the far end of my house that my father and I turned into an office. I know it sounds small, and it is; but it’s still bigger than my cube at work. Ask my wife. She has seen both and can tell you it’s true.

The hardware for this project once had a life as a Dell GX240, but now only the motherboard, case and the branding on the outside are still OEM. The memory, video card, power supply, sound card, and all the drives (even the floppy) have been replaced. And the way it stands now I am going to have to look in to modding the case to get some better air flow if I really am going to run it as a server. But that is another project.

I booted the beast up and put in the Ubuntu CD. It came up to the splash screen and I stepped through the pages selecting the various options I wanted for this build. When I was ready I clicked on the install button and waited. And waited. And waited. The process had hung at the point where it was about to reformat and partition the drives. Grrrrr. Oh well, this was supposed to be a learning process. If it all went smoothly what was I going to learn, right?

Thinking it was a fluke, I simply rebooted, selected my set up options and clicked go. No joy; it hung again in the same spot. This was odd since I had used these CDs before. I knew them to be good. No worries. I was not wed to this distro so I figured I would just try another.

A co-worker suggest I try doing a network install of Fedora Core 3. For those of you unaware of what a network install is it works like this. Rather than download and burn 4 CDs (at about 700MB each) you download and burn a boot CD that is about 10MB in size. Using this CD you boot the PC and run the installer. That program will ask you for a path to find the install files on a network. Since the internet is just a big network you can simply point it at the files on the web that you would have downloaded had you been using the traditional method. This has the advantage of having the installer only download the files you need and none of the ones you don’t. For example, only plan on using the Gnome desktop? Then there is no reason to spend the time getting KDE is there?

So once again I booted up the PC, this time using the Fedora boot disk. I stepped through the pages selecting the options I needed and telling it where to find the files on the internet. Once it had everything it needed to do the install I clicked “Next” and waited. And waited. And waited. Once more the system had hung at the point of formatting the drive.

This was starting to get frustrating. In hindsight I might have been better off swapping out for a different drive but since I was fairly sure that it was good I didn’t. Instead I dug around some older (Core 2) Fedora install disks and gave one more try. Success.

I am not sure why it worked this time, but it did. Anyone out there know what it is about the older core that would format my drive during the install when a newer core would not?

Anyway, the OS is up and running so the next step will be in install Apache, PHP and mySQL.