I. Installation

First and foremost,know your hardware. If your Linux machine is to be a dual boot system with Windows, then use the Windows Device Manager to record all your installed hardware and the settings used by Windows. If you are setting up a standalone Linux system, then gather as much documentation about your system as you can. This has become much less**important with the evolution of the Linux install routines**. Hardware compatibility and detection have been_greatly_improved over the past couple of years.

  • Hard drive – knowing the size and geometry is helpful when planning your partitioning.

  • SCSI adapters and devices (note the adapter chipset). SCSI is very well supported under Linux.

  • Sound card (note the chipset).

  • Video Card (important to know your chipset and memory, etc.).

  • Monitor timings

  • Horizontal and vertical refresh rates.

  • Network card settings (chipset).

  • Network Parameters:

  • IP (if not DHCP)

  • Netmask

  • Broadcast address

  • DNS servers

  • Default gateway

  • Modem

  • NO WINMODEMS. (Support is being worked on – checkhttp://www.linmodems.org. Note that if you have an HSF modem, Conexant has released Linux drivers! Find them athttp://www.conexant.com/customer/. I use them, and they work.)•USB support is in kernel 2.4. USB is standard in current distributions.

  • IEEE1394 (firewire) supportis included in current distributions.

Most distributions have a plethora of documentation, including online help and documents in downloadable form. For example, Red Hat users can check for hardware compatibility and installation issues at:

http://www.redhat.com/support/hardware/

If you cannot find your monitor documentation and need it for XFree86 (the Linux GUI) setup, then go to:http://www.monitorworld.com/monitors_home.html

results matching ""

    No results matching ""