Fedora Core – The Fun Begins
22 May 2005
SEATTLE – Things were kinda slow around here on Saturday morning so I decided to inflict some well-deserved pain upon myself by attempting a new Linux install. I had an old mini-tower case that used to run RedHat 7.2 before the primary drive crashed. Between it, and my wife’s old desktop box I figured I had plenty of (low-powered) hardware to keep me busy for a few hours.
The Box, Power Supply & Drives
The mini-tower is actually from our first PC, purchased in 1995. Because I’m loading it up with drives (more on this later) I swapped it’s 200 watt power supply with a 250 watt (I know…but it’s better than the 200 watt) from the desktop case. The only modification necessary was to extend the cable connected to the switch.
I found two 3GB drives and a single 13GB drive, all of them Western Digital. These were configured as follows:
| IDE Slot | Master | Slave |
|---|---|---|
| IDE0 | 3.2GB Caviar 33200 | 13.6GB Sparta |
| IDE1 | 16x CDROM | 3.2GB Caviar 33100 |
Which Distro? Configuration
While building up the box in the garage, I was downloading RedHat Fedora Core 4 (Test 3). Why Fedora? Good question. Probably the deciding factor was my familiarity with “things RedHat” from the old mini-tower. I had been all over that system over the years and am quite comfortable (relatively speaking, of course) with it.
The partition scheme I choose looks like this:
| Partition | Name | Size (MB) |
| /dev/hda1 | /boot | 98 |
| /dev/hda2 | / (root) | 2996 |
| /dev/hdb2 | /usr | 6000 |
| /dev/hda3 | /var | 996 |
| /dev/hda5 | swap | 509 |
| /dev/hda6 | /home | 5150 |
| /dev/hdd1 | /tmp | 511 |
| /dev/hdd2 | /share | 2504 |
The configuration (Which is still being installed…a day later. So much for a “few hours”) is starting with the workstation settings, with some extra stuff added, including:
- Web Server
- FTP Server
- MySQL
And whatever else looked interesting…