Here we will go through the installation procedure of Red Hat Linux via NFS, CDROM, and FTP. We will be blatantly skipping the SMB and hardrive installations. For the most part they are very similar, but there can be a couple of gotcha's which we will try to cover in detail.

The Fermi Red Hat Linux 5.0.2 is based on Red Hat 5.0 with some very important differences: it actually uses the Red Hat 5.1 boot and supplemental installation diskettes. The reason is that Red Hat inadvertantly changed some of their packages so dramatically that the 5.0 boot diskette's fails at a very critical moment during the installation. This was overcome by using the 5.1 boot diskette with some modifications that people doing NFS and CDROM installs will not see, but those installing via FTP will have to be aware of.
 

I. Things they don't tell you in school: tricks of the trade.
 
A. During the installation there are ways to get information about how things are going to help diagnose problems. This is via the Console Installation Screens:
1. Ctrl-Alt-F1 - The Newt Menu screen
 
a. This is the default interaction screen, where all choices are made, installation progress is noted, etc.

2. Ctrl-Alt-F2 - The interactive shell screen
 

a. This is a screen that gives you an interactive shell prompt. You can mount and unmount file systems, inspect files, run programs, etc. from this shell. This only is activated during the second stage install, i.e., after the NFS server has been mounted, the CD has been read, or the supplemental disk has been loaded.

3. Ctrl-Alt-F3 - The report screen
 

a. This the "stdout" screen that the installation program writes information to.

4. Ctrl-Alt-F4 - The kernel screen
 

a. In this screen you can see modules being loaded into the kernel, network connections/failures, etc.

5. Ctrl-Alt-F5 - The device screen
 

a. In this screen you can see the progress of the creation the filesystem on the system disk, probing for charater devices, ethernet cards, etc.