In this chapter, the plan is to cover the most important issues related to pre-installation preparation, the install itself and the most useful post-install configuration.

Since we're not assuming that the reader is already an accomplished Linux administrator, it's quite possible that some of the material in this chapter may be a bit overwhelming, but it's worth covering at least the most critical aspects of installation, to give you advice for some of the more confusing steps, and show you where the most common mistakes are made.

Once again, while it would be nice for this chapter to be distribution-independent, we're going to concentrate on just the most recent version of Red Hat Linux -- 8.0 -- although a lot of the chapter may still be relevant to other distributions.

In addition, the goal here is to keep things simple. To that end, we're going to focus on doing an installation assuming a working CD-ROM and (if necessary) a working floppy drive. There are numerous more sophisticated variations of installation, including hard drive-based and network-based (FTP, HTTP, NFS), but all of that is left for a later chapter.

Finally, we're not trying to replace the official Red Hat Installation Guide in this chapter. As helpful as we'd like to be, there's no substitute for the official guide if you really need all of the details.