Introducing UNIX and Linux

Installing Linux

Overview
Starting out
Preliminaries
      Collecting information about your system
      Installation options
Single boot
Dual boot
      Booting from CD/floppy
      Booting from your hard disk
      A partitionless install
      A dedicated Linux partition
Emulators
      VMware
      WINE
Installing Linux
      Installer software
      Linux partitioning
            Typical partitions
            User accounts
      LILO
The window manager
KDE
      Desktop help
      Applications
      The KDE Control Center
      File access and the command prompt
Summary

Starting out

If you want to download a freely distributed version of Linux, you can do no better than starting your venture at www.linux.org. As well as documenting general Linux information, details of the various Linux applications and on-line Linux tutorials, this official web site also plays host to the distribution of the numerous Linux packages.

The distribution of Linux is now extremely well supported and you will find that there are references to English and non-English language versions. There are also links to mirror sites where you can download Linux free of charge; there are details of Linux vendors and on-line reviews of some of the free Linux distributions.

At the last count there were at least forty versions of Linux which could be downloaded from this site. This chapter does not deal with the specifics involved in downloading any one of these distributions, but you will find that the on-line documentation provided with each package is quite adequate. However, there are a number of fundamental choices of which you should be aware when installing Linux; it is to these that we turn our attention in this chapter.