A Linux Installation

by Carl Tenning

Tacoma Open group For Microcomputers

Is Microsoft Windows about to be replaced by Linux? That's what we are hearing at the computer club meetings. It was stated that Linux is now the default operating system installed on Dell and other major computer manufactures and that Microsoft Windows is only an option at additional expense. Since I am totally unfamiliar with the Linux operating system, I wanted to experiment with Linux to see what it is all about. Without disrupting my existing system I decided to install Linux on an older spare machine. I purchased Red Hat Linux 8.0 for $19.99 at CompUSA. It comes on six CD-ROM disks along with an installation manual.

I removed the original hard drive with Windows 98 installed and installed an unused 3.1 GB hard drive. The computer also had a 50X CD-ROM drive. Red Hat Linux will boot the computer from the installation CD, so I needed to first go into the CMOS setup to select boot from CD-ROM. The Award BIOS uses the Del key to jump to the CMOS setup at startup. After that, Red Hat Linux installation booted from the CD-ROM.

During installation, the system installer asks for which boot loader to use. It gives three options:

Use GRUB Boot Loader

Use LILO Boot Loader

No Boot Loader

The first option was the default selection, so I went with that. Not long afterwards, the installation crashed.

I started again, this time selecting the LILO Boot Loader. This got considerably further, but eventually ran into an error due to a missing file. I started yet again, this time selecting No Boot Loader. A message comes up strongly advising against this, so I went back to the LILO option and tried again. Finally the installation commenced the Package Installation. It lists a total of 501 packages to install. This time it successfully completed the package that failed to install on the previous attempt. About 19% into the Package Installation however, the installation failed again. The message was:

"Error Installing Package

"There was an error installing XFree86-libs-4.2.0-72. This can indicate media failure, lack of disk space, and/or hardware problems. This is a fatal error and your install will be aborted. Please verify your media and try your install again.

"Press the OK button to reboot your system."

Going to the Internet for Linux help, I found that Linux was much more sensitive to hardware than other operating systems. At first I suspected the CD-ROM drive and swapped it out with one from another machine and tried the installation again. This time it got considerably further, but still failed again. So now I thought it might be the hard drive, so I swapped it for a spare 15GB one. Again the installation encountered a fatal error. At this point I figured that this computer was just not Linux compatible. The configuration was a P200+ Cyrix 686 with 32MB ram and a SiS-5582 chipset. The BIOS was dated 11/10/97.

My next attempt was on a Pentium 200 computer with 64MB ram, VIA chipset and BIOS date 08/14/97, using the same 15GB hard drive as on the last attempt. This time the installation was successful. Upon running RedHat Linux, however, it could not find the modem, so the system was useless for accessing the Internet or email. The boot time for RedHat Linux was 3 minutes: 25 seconds, whereas on the same machine with Windows ME, the boot time was only one minute: 30 seconds. The performance of applications was also dreadfully slow. Nothing like Windows.

So, my conclusion is that while Linux may run well on the one-gigahertz or higher machines, it does not appear suitable for anything slower. To really evaluate the usefulness of Linux I would have to get a much faster machine.