This page contains tips and configuration notes for Linux Red Hat 6.0 (kernel 2.2.5-15) configured in September 1999.

Introduction

It is now October 1999. I have brought up a Redhat 6.0, kernel 2.2.5-15, and configured it as a desktop machine named Red Box, running an AMD K-2 400MHz CPU on 256MB of RAM. This is a new machine which operates at a site physically remote to the oceanpark.com server, which is still running Redhat 5.2. However, I will change oceanpark.com to Red Hat 6.0 or 6.1 (when released) in the near future, based on the postive experience I am having with Red Hat 6.0.

I brought up Red Hat 6.0 as part of Linux Demo Days to both show others what Linux is all about and to try using Linux as my desktop machine on a regular basis. I am happy to report success.

Within the next week I will check out Corel Linux and report back. From what I am reading on the net, Corel Linux is very easy to install and has some nice built-in applications.

Overall Impression of Red Hat 6.0

Linux rocks. However, I feel that the Red Hat 6.0 is not quite ready for a novice user to install Linux. Some novice users may get lucky but had I been a novice user, I would not have been able to get through the install without getting some help from someone with Linux expertise. During Linux Demo Days, we also tested SuSE and Mandrake installations. Mandrake 6.0 truly was the easiest but still requires knowledge about file partitions. SuSE 4.2 was more complicated than Red Hat 6.0 to install.

Applications I have working

Thus far, Red Box is running the following applications. They were almost all very easy to install, in most cases as easy or easier than installing an application in Windows.

• Netscape 4.61 Web browser, IMAP Email, and Newsgroup reader
• Real Network Real Audio player
• Corel WordPerfect for Linux
• Applixware 4.4.2
• Nichimen Graphics Corporation Mirai 3-D Modeller
• ID Software's Quake 2 (using software X driver)
• Loki Entertainment' Myth II
• KDE and GNOME Desktops (each has advantages/disadvantages, see below)

I also configured another Red Hat machine to be a firewall at my remote Demo Days site. Behind the firewall I run Red Box and another Linux machine for testing different Linux distributions. I also run a Windows machine behind the firewall. All of the machines are connected to the internet on a 768Kbps DSL link via IPMasquerading provided by the firewall.

Issues which came up during installation

The installation of Red Hat 6.0 went fairly smoothly but I ran into some problems which would have been nearly insurmountable for a computer novice, including getting sound to work and getting the system to come up after I changed video cards. I got sound working with a small amount of hassle, got X working with a fair amount of hassle, and got everything else up and running with pretty much no problem. For a novice, I would recommend Corel Linux or Mandrake.

In what follows, I recount my Red Hat 6.0 installation experience, pretty much in the order things happened.

The first installation seemed to go through without difficulty, although I know all about file partitions and that part of the installation would most likely still be confusing to a novice. I can report that Disk Druid works better than it did in Red Hat 5.2.

For networking, I use a D-Link DFE-530TX ethernet card and knew from previous experience to specify that VARhine driver (not an obvious choice).

I use a Logitech Mouse-man mouse. On the bottom of the mouse is a little tag that says it is a serial port mouse. But I have a PS/2 adaptor for it. The Red Hat mouse instructions seem to differentiate between PS/2 and serial mouse so it's confusing what to specify. I just tell the installation program that I have a Logitech Mouse-man mouse and things work fine. For the video card configuration, Red Hat still does not auto-detect video cards. You have to manually choose it form a list of video cards shown to you. I could not find my 3Dfx Voodoo 3 card in the list. So, I chose plain VGA and I chose to start X automatically after booting. That was a mistake. After rebooting, the system started and X started but the video resolution was such that I could only see a tiny piece of my desktop appearing in the monitor. And I could find no way to grab the edge of the Xterm which was there to close it.

I ended up deciding to reinstall even though I am experienced enough to know how to reconfigure X on my own. But I wanted to have the experience of going through an install of Red Hat which was fully automatic.

During my second installation attempt, I got back to the video card part of the installation. At that point, I did some research (using another machine connected to the net) and concluded that Linux did not support my card. So I specified an ATI Rage IIC card and at the end of the installation when it asked me to reboot my machine, I simply turned off the machine and put in an ATI Rage IIC card in place of my Voodoo3 card.

That was also a bad idea.

After rebooting, when X tried to start up, it just brought up a blank screen then died, leaving me back in the command prompt. I looked in the 'Getting Started' book which comes with Red Hat but that book assumes that you have X installed and running and are already using the GNOME GUI.

I then decided to manually configure X and stop playing around. So I dug in and learned (relearned stuff I used to know but had since forgotten since my last installation almost one year ago) about Xconfigurator to reconfigure X to know about my ATI Rage IIC video card and 19 inch Phillips high-resolution monitor. I will omit the details, except to say that if your card is in the list of video cards, choose it. Then simply edit the Vertical and Horizontal frequency line entries in /etc/X11/XF86Config to correspond to your monitor's specifications, if you are lucky enough to have a monitor with a manual that clearly states what those frequencies are. Mine are:

    HorizSync   30-95
    VertRefresh 50-160

Note. To start X Windows, enter the command:

  startx

To force X to shutdown, hit the key combination:

  Ctl-Alt-Backspace.

If at any time you enter a command and the system tells you something about not being able to find the command, then you may have what is sometimes referred to as a 'path problem'. In that case, try to do whereis foobar to locate where a command named foobar actually resides in your file system. If that tells you where, then enter the entire pathname and keep your fingers crossed.

Sound. I had to manually run sndconfig to configure for sound even though I told Red Hat that I wanted Sound. I found out about sndconfig by doing `man -k sound`, although I first had to do `makewhatis` in order to get 'man -k sound` to work. I have no idea how a novice user would ever figure out that sequence. The good news is that sndconfig was a no brainer to use and after it did its thing, I had sound in my KDE Desktop (but not in GNOME). I prefer KDE to GNOME for now anyway, so no great loss. I do look forward to using GNOME eventually but it had some other annoying issues that keep me away from it for the moment. This is the first time I have experienced sound in Linux and I like it. It makes playing games possible and makes my web browsing experience more complete via the Real Audio Plug-in. Note: to make Netscape work with Real Audio, go to the Netscape menu:

Edit | Preferences | Navigator | Applications

Description: RealAudio

MIMEType: audio/x-pn-realaudio

Suffixes: ra,ram and

Application: /usr/bin/realplay %s

I have various additional notes which I am compiling and will post here some day. For now, I will leave you with some chicken scratches and refer you to previous versions of these notes (see links above) for more further history and explanation of my configuration.

My firewall script:

I run Red Box inside of a firewall which is another Red Hat machine configured to do nothing but act as a firewall for other machines on my internal network. See http://oceanpark.com/notes/firewall_example.html

Useful commands and programs:

Very partial List of useful commands and programs. The difference between a command and a program is an 'advanced topic' (a UNIX anachronism, IMHO)

• startx -- start the X Windows system graphical user interface.
• Ctl-Alt-Backspace -- force X to exit, returning you to a command prompt.
• dir -- show files in the current directory
• ls -- same as dir
• ls -l -- ls output in long format, showing privleges and dates
• ls -a -- ls output shows files whose names start with .
• ls -t -- ls output sorted by time last modified
• ls -lat -- all of the above
• mv -- move (rename)
• cp -- copy
• cp -a -- copy a file and preserve attributs of the file
• cp -ar foo bar -- recursively copy directory foo and all its subdiretories to bar
• rm -- remove
• rm -r foo -- recursively remove directory foo and all its subdirectories
• rm -f foo -- force removal (don't prompt for permission) -- use with caution!
• rm -fr foo -- recursively remove directory foo and all its subdirectories without prompting
• man foo -- tell about the command foo
• man -k foo -- tell about all man pages having the keyword foo
• makewhatis -- update the man pages
• /usr/bin/whereis foo -- tell where foo is (full pathnames)
• /usr/bin/which -- tell which foo is first in the current path
• printenv PATH -- show the current path
• printenv -- show all environment variables
• find . -name "foo*" -- find all files below the current directory whose name starts with foo
• /usr/sbin/adduser -- to create a new user
• /usr/sbin/useradd -- same as adduser
• /usr/sbin/groupadd -- add a group (see /etc/group)
• /usr/sbin/mouseconfig
• /usr/sbin/smbd {start/stop} -- turns on/off Samba daemon
• /usr/bin/free -- shows memory usage, including swap
• fdisk -l -- compare the output of this to the content of /etc/fstab

Configuration files:

Partial List of Configuration Files, Directories, and Programs.

• /etc -- where almost all system configuration data resides
• /etc/sysconfig/network -- the main network configuration file
• /etc/resolv.conf -- network configuration of name server
• /etc/rc.d/ -- startup files -- see rc.local and rc.sysinit programs, below
• /etc/rc.d/rc -- script which starts everything
• /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit -- what kicks things off when Linux boots
• /etc/rc.d/rc.local - local things to execute at boot time

• /var/log -- various logs of interest
• /var/log/xferlog -- ftp transfers
• /var/log/secure -- log of successful and refused attempts to access the system
• /var/run -- where server daemons usually place their pids (useful for kill -SIGHUP <pid>)
• /etc/issue -- dynamically rewritten by /etc/rc.d/rc.local
• /etc/fstab -- directory mounts done at boot time - edit with caution
• /etc/profile -- contains global environment variable settings (e.g. PERLLIB="/usr/local/lib/perl")
• /etc/bashrc -- contains global alias commands (e.g. alias ll='ls -l')
• /etc/hosts -- place entries for your LAN workstations
• /var/spool/mail -- don't forget to copy over from old disk so users don't lose mail
• /etc/passwd -- adduser places new user here, edit manually to change name, shell, etc.
• /etc/group -- add new groups and associate users with a group
• /usr/local/bin -- where I put in-house programs and scripts of general interest
• /usr/local/sbin -- where I put in-house system programs such as wwwstat, backup, etc.
• /etc/sendmail.cf -- SMTP configuration -- touch with caution
• /etc/inetd.conf, hosts.deny, hosts.allow -- TCP/IP security (in addition to firewall)
• /etc/smb.conf -- Samba configuration
• /etc/crontab -- specification of what programs to automatically run at regular intervals
• /etc/services -- tcp/ip services -- I don't modify this, but of interest
• /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf/ -- The httpd web server configuration file (only need this one)