Fedora Linux install (part 1)
Today I'm going to set up a web server for LAMP development using Fedora 2.0.

I'm a big fan of RH Linux. I've always used it (except for a brief dalliance with TurboLinux back in the day), and I always will. Oh, no I won't. Redhat linux has split off, I find from their website, into two branches: the Enterprise Edition, and Fedora. OK, well, I download the torrents for Fedora, and let's see how it compares to the original.

First thing is to use the graphical install. For some odd reason, I choose to do the disc check at the beginning of the install. This process consumes five minutes of time and tells me nothing new. I settle in for a few games of two-deck Spider Solitaire while I'm waiting. I lose them both and decline to check further media.

OK, next up is the disk partitioning. Damn. Now I have to remember all the friggin partitions and how big they should be. OK. Done.

Next is to select the desktop environment. I don't really use X, but I'm going to see what the latest version of GNOME has to offer, so I choose it. I'm also going to choose to have the installer install all of my software: php, perl, mysql, apache, ssh, ftp.

I see that it uses the highly sucky BIND/SENDMAIN combo for DNS and mail, instead of the preferred TinyDNS/qmail. I disable that right quick. Also, from the config options, I cannot tell if either perl or php are being installed. great. Plus, I can't tell which httpd is being used. Is that apache? who knows? Ok, whatever, I go ahead with the install.

Bam. Irrecoverable error. It seems that my 1GB allocation for the /usr partition wasn't enough. Ugh. Furthermore, when I try to navagate backwards back to the partition screen, I am informed that I cannot return to that screen (because the filesystem is active... ??? Uh, deactivate it?), so I am forced to, essentially, start over from scratch. Thanks.

OK. New approach. This time, i'm going to have Fedora install the absolute minimum to become a functioning linux box, then I'm going to manually install my development environment. This is what I usually do when setting up a server, but I wanted to give the installer a chance to fail, which it did in spectacular fashion.

On the second attempt, I give a much more liberal dose of disk partitioning, opting to not put /usr or /usr/local on their own partitions at all, and giving / 20 GB. However, when it came time to selecty packages, I noticed that the keyboard I had was all nasty. I started spraying it with compressed air and using a paper towel to absorb the gunk *shudder* that came out of it, only to have Fedora suddenly start installing things. Hm. Guess there's a keyboard shortcut in there somewhere to start the process. Oh well. On to the third attempt.

OK. partition. network. Packages. Let's see how it goes from here...


- posted by frank crist @ 5:10 PM