Starting the Installation Program

While the installation program loads, messages scroll on your screen. When loading is complete, this prompt appears:

boot:

There are several ways to reach this point. You can:

Insert the diskette included in your boxed set (or a PCMCIA support or network boot diskette that you've created) into the primary diskette drive and reboot your computer.
If your computer can boot from the CD-ROM drive, insert the Red Hat Linux CD into the drive and reboot.

Boot MS-DOS, and start a program in the dosutils directory of the Red Hat Linux CD-ROM named autoboot.bat. (This will work from DOS only; it will not work from a DOS window started from Windows.)

Alpha and SPARC: If you haven't created your diskettes yet, please refer to the Official Red Hat Linux Alpha/SPARC Installation Addendum for more information on the diskettes required to install Red Hat Linux on your system. After you've created the necessary diskettes, please finish reading the appropriate chapter of the Official Red Hat Linux Alpha/SPARC Installation Addendum for information on starting the installation.

Displaying Online Help

Once the installation program is loaded into memory, you can obtain information about the installation process and options by pressing F1 through F6. For example, press F2 to see general information about the online help screens.

Boot Options

If you press Enter at the boot prompt, or if you take no action within the first minute after the boot prompt appears, the graphical installation program explained in the Official Red Hat Linux Installation Guide starts. Pressing one of the help screen function keys as described above disables this autostart feature. To start the text mode installation program explained here, before pressing Enter, type:

boot: text

If the install program does not properly detect your hardware, you may need to restart the installation in "expert" mode. To start an expert mode installation, type:

boot: text expert

Expert mode disables most hardware probing, and gives you the option of entering options for the drivers loaded during the installation.

Please Note: The initial boot messages will not contain any references to SCSI or network cards. This is normal; these devices are supported by modules that are loaded during the installation process.

Other options that may be entered with the boot command include the following.

For example, to instruct the kernel to use all the RAM in a 128 MB system, enter:

boot: linux mem=128M