RED HAT 5.0-SPECIFIC COMMENTS

If for some reason you want to install Red Hat 5.0 from CD or FAT-32 partition, you'll need my joliet.img file. For hard disk installations, you'll also need the supp.img file. You'll need the RAWRITE.EXE utility (for DOS or Win95), LOADDSKF.EXE (for OS/2; it's on the OS/2 install CD), or Unix/Linux dd to create floppies from these .img files.

The following comments apply only to installing Red Hat 5.0; they do not apply to versions 5.1 or above.

5.0 Pitfall #1: Driver differences. In order to create my modified Red Hat 5.0 boot disk, I had to recompile the Linux kernel and replace all the drivers on the original Red Hat boot floppy. As I have no idea what driver parameters, or even necessarily what drivers, went into Red Hat's original kernel, I can't guarantee that my disk will work in all cases where the original will, or that the system installed on the hard disk will work where my boot floppy did. A few specific cases where I know there may be problems include:

• I couldn't get the Linux floating-point emulation to compile; it kept complaining that it couldn't find a rule to make some particular target. I've therefore omitted it, and my boot floppy will be useless if you don't have an FPU in your system. (All Intel, AMD, and Cyrix Pentium-class and better CPUs do have FPUs, as do most 486 systems and many 386es.)
• Similarly, I couldn't get the NCR 5380 driver to compile, and so I've omitted it. This driver doesn't seem to have been in the original Red Hat boot disk, either. Note that I am not talking about the NCR/Symbios 53c8xx or 53c7,8xx drivers, both of which are included on my disk.
• Because I may have used different driver parameters as defaults, it's possible that you may need different parameters to boot the install disk than to boot the system once it's installed. I ran into this myself; both the installed system and Red Hat's original install floppy hang on my NCR/Symbios 53c825-based system, but my floppy boots up fine. The solution in my case was the same as the solution to install using Red Hat's original disk and a Rock Ridge CD: select "expert" mode and the 53c7,8xx driver rather than the 53c8xx driver that's otherwise used.

Also, I've omitted all the networking drivers that are included on the original Red Hat disk. After all, the whole point of this is to install locally using Joliet or FAT-32, for which the networking drivers are moot. This shouldn't prevent networking from functioning once the system's installed, though it's conceivable that the networking configuration during installation will fail (I've no way of testing this myself). It might be best to forego network configuration until the entire system is installed, therefore. Note, however, that the lack of networking in this boot floppy doesn't prevent you from installing Red Hat on a networked machine via a Joliet CD attached to a local network server. In that case, it's only necessary that the server understand Joliet, and you'd use the standard Red Hat install floppies.

Note #1: Error about unmounting filesystems. On my system, once installation of Red Hat 5.0 is complete I get a message about being unable to un-mount a filesystem. I don't know what causes this, but as far as I can tell it doesn't really do any harm. I believe it refers to the RAMdisk, but it might be the CD-ROM. In either case, it doesn't affect the just-installed system, so I've ignored it, and suggest you do, too, unless you know why you shouldn't (in which case, please clue me in!).

Note #2: Joliet support once installed. Red Hat 5.0 does not pull the final configuration's boot kernel off of the floppy; it takes it from the CD. Therefore, the Joliet support compiled into my modified kernel will not be transferred to your final installation. The main consequence of this is that if you install Red Hat 5.0 from a Joliet CD, it will revert to 8.3 filenames under Linux once you've installed it; or you'll lose access to your FAT-32 partition once Linux is installed. You may or may not have .rpm extensions on all your RPMs, the RPMs won't be exactly where glint will look for them, etc. You can either live with this (as far as I know, if you use glint for package management it won't make any difference once you tell it where to look for packages) or compile yourself a new kernel with Joliet support. Look for the original Joliet patches at http://bmrc.berkeley.edu/people/chaffee/, or simply upgrade to a newer kernel (2.0.34 and above include Joliet and FAT-32 support).

I am officially calling this the beta-2 release of the Red Hat 5.0 Joliet/FAT-32 install floppy image. It works for me on my system, using either a Plextor 12/20Plex CD-ROM driven by an NCR/Symbios 53c825 adapter or an older 8x Creative Labs EIDE drive, with the target being SCSI hard drives attached to the same adapter as the Plextor. I've not tested it with EIDE hard drives, older proprietary-interface CD-ROM drives, or other SCSI adapters; but I've included what I believe to be all the drivers necessary for such attempts to work. If you have problems, feel free to report them to me. Please include any error messages you get, including anything relevant-looking when you hit the < Alt-F3 > key. Also be sure to tell me what CD-R burning software you used (for Joliet CD installations), whether or not it worked; if I get enough reports, I'll create a table of software that does and does not work for this purpose. (Just a note up front: In my tests, Adaptec's Easy CD Creator 3.01 looked like it did not work!)

If you want to create a Rock Ridge CD for use with Red Hat 5.0, there are no Red Hat 5.0-specific notes; just create it as you would a Rock Ridge CD for Red Hat 5.1.