The Sans-Anaconda Install

Anaconda is the installer for Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (and their derivatives). For a normal installation, it works well. But sometimes you need to do something a little more insane.

For power users, doing a manual installation can sometimes be the right answer if Anaconda doesn’t support your disk layout or if you want an excessively minimal installation.

This document contains the process for installing many Red Hat-like distributions manually, as well as some discussion on whether or not to install Linux like this.

Contents

• Introduction
  • Who this manual is for
  • What this manual won’t tell you
  • We want your help!
• Prerequisites for installation
  • Why a Live CD?
  • Downloading and using a Live CD
• Preparing your system for installation
  • Back up your data
  • Start the machine
• Setting up disks
  • Disk partitioning
  • RAID and LVM
  • Partition formatting
  • Mount the partitions
• Installing packages
  • Initialize the RPM database
  • Download and install the release package
  • Install core packages
• Configuring the system
  • Filesystem table (/etc/fstab)
  • RAID configuration (/etc/mdadm.conf)
  • LVM configuration (/etc/lvm/lvm.conf)
  • Timezone configuration (/etc/localtime)
  • Copy standard files to the root home directory
  • Set the root password
  • Install the kernel package
• Install the bootloader
  • GRUB 1
  • GRUB 2
• Cross your fingers and reboot
• Appendix A: GNU Free Documentation License

Copyright and license

Copyright 2012 Ian Weller and others. All rights reserved.

This document is licensed under both of the following licenses:

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled “Appendix A: GNU Free Documentation License”.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/.

You may select the license of your choice.

Document history

Version 0.1, May 8, 2012

First manual-like version, written for ENGL 362 at the University of Kansas.

Version 0.0, date unknown

Two plain-text files containing slightly-annotated instructions for installing Scientific Linux 6.0 and Fedora 16.