Planning for Hard Drive Storage for Your Fedora Installation
Making room for Fedora requires you to decide on how to use existing hard drive space. You might decide to replace existing hard drives entirely, for example, or you might decide to use only one operating system on your computer, making partitioning unnecessary. A full install from this book's DVD will require at least 7GB hard drive space just for the software, so if you plan to install everything, a 10GB hard drive could be ideal for a workstation. Note that depending on how you plan to use Linux, a smaller-capacity disk can be used, or a disk capacity many times the size of your system will be required.
The following recommended installations and minimal storage requirements are based on a full install of the freely available version of Fedora distributed on the Internet. The copy of Fedora included with this book is the same, but you might find many additional software packages available from third-party Fedora contributors. Installing additional software affects your storage requirements.
The Fedora installer no longer provides different installation classes. Instead it allows you a lot of control over the software that you want to install. However, you can specify whether you want to install tools for productivity and development and can specific packages according to your exact requirements. Fedora computes the storage space required when you are selecting packages, so you can always be sure that you have sufficient hard drive space before it starts to install. Of course, if you are after a minimalist installation, here are some software packages you might want to consider passing up in the installation process for as small a system as possible:
► X
► Gnome
► KDE
► Any graphical Internet tools
► Office/productivity applications
► Documentation
► Sound and video applications and utilities
► Any development software or libraries
Checking Hardware Compatibility
Fedora software for Intel-based PCs is compiled for the minimum x86 platform supported by the Linux kernel.
The compatibility information in this appendix relates to Fedora. Other distributions might have different storage and CPU requirements. Also bear in mind that Fedora is available for x86-64 and PPC architectures, too. Consult the release notes to get a detailed specification for these versions.
Specific issues regarding Linux hardware compatibility can be researched online at a number of sites. A pretty good place to visit if you want to know about general hardware compatibility with Linux is http://www.linuxquestions.org/hcl/index.php; this covers a wide range of hardware devices and peripherals.
Other sites, such as the Linux-USB device overview at http://www.qbik.ch/usb/devices/, offer an interactive browsing of supported devices, and printer compatibility can be researched at LinuxPrinting.org at http://linuxprinting.org/. Some hardware categories to consider in your research include the following:
► Controller cards — Such as SCSI, IDE, SATA, FireWire
► CPUs — Intel, AMD, Power, 64 Bit, and Multi-Core
► Input devices — Keyboards
► Modems — External, PCMCIA, PCI, and controllerless workarounds
► Network cards — ISA, PCI, USB, and others
► Pointing devices — Mice, tablets, and possibly touch screens
► Printers — Various printer models
► RAM — Issues regarding types of system memory
► Sound cards — Issues regarding support
► Specific motherboard models — Compatibility or other issues
► Specific PCs, servers, and laptop models — Compatibility reports, vendor certification
► Storage devices — Removable, fixed, and others
► Video cards — Console issues (X compatibility depends on the version of X or vendor-based X distribution used.)
If you have a particular laptop or PC model, check with its manufacturer for Linux support issues. Some manufacturers such as HP now offer a Linux operating system preinstalled, or have an in-house Linux hardware certification program. Laptop users will definitely want to browse to Linux on Laptops at http://linux-laptop.net/.
A company called EmperorLinux in the United States supplies laptops from prominent manufacturers with Linux preinstalled complete with support. They have been in business for a few years now, and ensure 100% compatibility with the laptops that they sell. Check out their range athttp://www.emperorlinux.com.
If you cannot find compatibility answers in various online databases, continue your research by reading the Linux Hardware HOWTO at http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/ Hardware-HOWTO/. At that address, you will find loads of general information and links to additional sources of information.
Keep in mind that when PC hardware is unsupported under Linux, it is generally because the manufacturer cannot or will not release technical specifications or because no one has taken the time and effort to develop a driver. If you hit a roadblock with a particular piece of hardware, check the hardware manufacturer's support web pages, or Google's Linux pages at http://www.google.com/linux. You can then type in a specific search request and hopefully find answers to how to make the hardware work with Linux. This is also a good way to research answers to questions about software issues.
Preparing for Potential Hardware Problems
Fedora will work "out of the box" with nearly every Intel-or PowerPC-based desktop, server, and laptop; drivers for thousands of different types of hardware peripherals are included. But you can sometimes run into problems if Linux does not recognize a hard ware item, if Fedora does not correctly initialize the hardware, or if an initialized item is incorrectly configured. For these reasons, some hardware items are prone to creating problems during an install. In the sections that follow, you learn some important pointers for avoiding these problems or resolving those that do occur.
As you read earlier, most Linux hardware-related installation problems stem from a lack of technical specifications from the manufacturer, thwarting efforts of open source developers to create a driver. In the recent past, one hardware item that triggered both types of difficulties was the controllerless modem, also colloquially known as a WinModem. The good news is that modem chipset manufacturers have been more forthcoming with driver details. Some original equipment manufacturers, such as IBM, have made a concerted effort to provide Linux support. Support for the ACP Mwave modem, used in ThinkPad 600/Es and 770s, is included in the Linux kernel. Drivers have been developed for many of the controllerless modem chipsets that formally did not work with Linux.
If a driver is not available for your controllerless modem, you have a few options. You can download the driver's source code and build the driver yourself. Alternatively, you can download a binary-only software package and install the driver.
Some controllerless modems might also need to be initialized and configured through a separate utility program. The modem, if supported, should work normally after you install and configure the driver.
You can research Linux support for controllerless modems by browsing to http://www.linmodems.org/.