Next: Creating the boot Up: Installing the Linux Previous: Creating the filesystems

Installing the software

Finally, you are ready to install the software on your system. Every distribution has a different mechanism for doing this. Many distributions have a self-contiained program which will step you through the installation. On other distributions, you will have to mount your filesystems in a certain subdirectory (such as /mnt) and copy the software to them by hand. On CD-ROM distributions, you may be given the option to install a portion of the software on your hard drives, and leave most of the software on the CD-ROM.

Some distributions offer several different ways to install the software. For example, you may be able to install the software directly from an MS-DOS partition on your hard drive, instead of from floppies. Or, you may be able to install over a TCP/IP network via FTP or NFS. See your distribution's documentation for details.

As an example, the SLS distribution of Linux uses the doinstall command to install the software. It takes the form

rootfs fs1 mount-pt1 fs2 mount-pt2 ...fsN mount-ptN
where rootfs is the name of your root filesystem, fs1 and mount-pt1 are the names of an additional filesystem and the mount point for that filesystem, and so on. For example, if you have a single filesystem for Linux on /dev/hda2, you would install the software with the command
#doinstall /dev/hda2
If you had an additional filesystem on /dev/hda4 for /usr, you would instead use the command
#doinstall /dev/hda2 /dev/hda4 /usr

Again, the above commands are meant only as examples. The exact method used to install the Linux software differs greatly with each distribution. We're hoping that installing the Linux software should be self-explanatory, as it is with most distributions.



Next: Creating the boot Up: Installing the Linux Previous: Creating the filesystems


abraham@iesd.auc.dk