Title: Planning to Install Linux
Course: CIS 208: Linux/UNIX III: Intermediate System Administration, Networking, and Security ~ For IGNITE Review > Section: Learning Modules

Planning to Install Linux

Before starting an installation of Linux, it is important that you begin with project management. You have to meet with numerous people and ask lots of questions. Here are some important questions that you should prepare to ask:

- What tasks will be performed on this host?
- What distribution of Linux do I need to install?
- Will the hardware I have now run the selected version?
- What type of hard drives am I going to use?
- How am I going to partition those hard drives?
- Which bootloader will be used to load the OS?
- What filesystem am I going to install?
- What information do I need to connect the host to a network?
- What method of installation will be used?

You can see there are lots of things that have to be determined before you should start an installation. This section will cover each of the steps in more detail.

Step 1: Talk to Key People

The first thing you need to do in planning for your installation is to talk to all of the key players. Talk to management and especially the end-users. What management envisions may not be what works for the end-users. The end-users are the people on the front line; they know exactly what they need. It is important to determine the tasks the host will need to perform or what problem will be satisfied with this installation. Does the host need to be a server or a desktop? Make sure everyone is in agreement as to what the host is expected to do before you move to the next step.

Step 2: Distributions

Picking the distribution, or distro, that will be used can be a challenge. The first step to determine is whether the host should be a server or a desktop; this should be identified during preliminary discussions with key people. The answer to this question can determine which distribution will be used. For example, Community Enterprise Operating System (CentOS) is a Linux distribution that acts more as a server than as a desktop. Fedora and Ubuntu are operating systems that act more like desktops. Fedora and Ubuntu can act as servers, but usually do not.

Step 3: Naming Conventions

Before you can determine how you are going to partition your hard drives, you need to determine what type of hard drives you are going to use. As a quick review, there are Parallel ATA hard drives (PATA) and Serial ATA (SATA), or the Small Computer System Interface (SCSI). The ATA in these two acronyms stands for Advanced Technology Attachment.

Step 4: Partitioning

When using MBR format rather than GPT to set up your drives, it is important to know that you can only have four primary partitions or three primaries and one extended partition that can hold multiple logical partitions. When you are working with a single hard drive, it is known as hda or sda. Each partition you create on that drive gets a number starting with 1. The extended or logical partition starts with 5. It does not matter which primary partition you select to extend.

For example – the first partition on your first PATA (or IDE) drive would be /dev/hda1.  The next three will be /dev/hda2, /dev/hda3, and /dev/hda4.  You can then select any of these four partitions to “extend”.  To compare this to Windows, hda1 would normally be C:, hda2, D:, hda3, E:, and hda4, F:.  When you extend a partition (create multiple virtual partitions), they start with /dev/hda5 and continue with /dev/hda6, /dev/hda7, etc.  Normally, you the 4th partition is the one that is extended.

If your drives are SATA or SCSI, the “h” in hda is replaced with “s” to make them /dev/sda1, /dev/sda2, /dev/sda3, /dev/sda4, etc.

Step 5: Default Bootloader

Before proceeding with your installation, you have to decide whether to select the default bootloader for your system or pick another one. A bootloader is a program that starts when you boot your system, which loads the OS Kernal into RAM. You may have set up your home PC where you can boot into Windows or another operating system. The bootloader allows you to control what operating system is loaded.

Step 6: Additional Installation Needs

There is additional information needed to put the host on a network. You will need to know the following:

- A host name
- An IP address and subnet mask
- A gateway IP address which is actually the router's address
- The DNS server's IP address
- Whether you have a DHCP server on your network; if you do, the previously listed information can be dynamically assigned when the system boots, but you must know the IP address of that server

One final consideration: What software will you need to install during installation? You will be provided with a list of software that can be installed, but recommendations say to only install what you know you are going to use. You can always install additional software later.

Source: Lesson_1_Installing_Linux by NGD (Source properly)