Linux Installation Guide

Linux as free and open source operating system comes in many flavours or distributions. Distributions oriented toward desktop usage will typically use X Window System as graphical interface and an accompanying desktop environment such as GNOME, KDE, LXDE or Xfce. Distributions intended t
o run as a servers may omit graphical user interface environment from the standard install but instead may include other usefull software such as Apache HTTP Server, SSH server, Relational Database system (such as MySQL) etc...

Althought there are many different distributions available today; Debian, Ubuntu, Gentoo, Knoppix, Suse Linux..., usage and installation process is somewhat similar. No matter which distribution user choose, following some simple concepts, installation and basic configuration should be easy even for beginners.

Installing Linux

There are available different methods for installing Linux on system, but the most popular is by downloading and burning a distribution image to a media like CD/DVD and then booting Your system from it. Once You have downloaded and burned Linux .ISO from distribution’s home page (example Linux xubuntu) to a media, insert itand reboot Your system. At the "chosse boot priority" prompt, select to boot from CD/DVD which should start the installation process:

Select a language of an installation process:

At installation menu, select Installation process:

Choose manual partitioning so You can create partitions:

Once in partitioning tool, select hard drive where You want to install Linux and creat new partition table:

Select hard drive on which You want to install

Confirm creation of new partition table:

(Boot loader like GRUB or LILO is a program that installs it's instructions in MBR of a hard drive and loads operating system if needed. Once Operating system is started, bootloader gives control to the OS. Althought bootloader doesn't have to be installed on a saparate partition, because of securitiy and recovery, the best practice is to creat a new separate partition for it. 150Mb is more than enough.)

Once partition table is created, select free space and "Add new partition":

(Swap area is a virtual memory implementation on Operating System. It is an extension of the main RAM memory which is reserved on a hard drive in case RAM memory needs more space. Generaly, the rule is to assign 3 x main memory space to swap. For example, if system have 512Mb of RAM or main memory, 1535 Megabytes should be assigned to swap.)

Select free space and "Add new partition" for creating Swap area:

(Every Linux system must have "/" or "root" parition. This is a partition where Operating system installs itself.

Select free space and "Add new partition" for creating root partition: