Collecting Information About Your System

Before you launch into the installation process, you should collect some basic information about your system. Generally, Red Hat’s installer will successfully probe your system and discover its configuration, but when it fails to do so, you must be prepared to supply the required information. Otherwise, you’ll be forced to terminate the installation procedure, obtain the information, and then start all over again.

Information You Need

Table 2-1 specifies the configuration information you need and gives you space to conveniently record the information as you gather it. If your system currently runs Windows, you can obtain much of the needed information by using Windows utilities, as explained in the next section. To obtain the remaining information, you can consult your system documentation and the documentation for any devices installed by you. If your documentation is missing or incomplete, you may need to contact your hardware vendor or manufacturer. Alternatively, you may be able to find the needed information on the manufacturer’s web site; use a search engine such as Google (which is powered by Linux) to discover the URL of the web site.

Sometimes, you’ll need to examine your system’s BIOS settings or open your system’s case and examine the installed hardware; consult your system documentation to learn how to do so. Finally, if you’re installing Linux in a large organization such as a business or a university, your system administrator ...

Get Learning Red Hat Linux, Third Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.