Re: Good Red Hat install

[Robert Wesley McGrew <rwm8 () CS MsState EDU>]

Well, I'm not sure if you're completely set on Redhat for this or not, but
it seems like you're wanting this machine to do network testing and run
Linux based security tools, so it may be a good idea to look at some other
lightweight distributions.

In the past I have set up a P100 with 64 megs of ram and a 300 meg hard
drive, a P150 laptop with 16 megs and a 1.6 gig drive, and currently a K-6
166 with 128 megs, for situations like you're talking about, and very
quickly I found that it can be quite difficult to trim Redhat down to what
you need.

My weapon of choice in this scenario has been Slackware, latest version
you can get your hands on (currently, 9).  Use the "expert" installation
option so you can pick and choose your packages on an individual basis.
On a 233Mhz machine, if you have plenty of ram, and a big enough hard
drive to hold the packages you want, you will probably won't have to make
many sacrifices. A gig or two will give you enough for a very useful
installation; I can get it under 300 megs if I'm careful and have a very
well defined plan of what I want the machine to do.  Ditch KDE and Gnome
because they don't really have anything to offer you in this situation,
but keep the Qt and GTK libraries if you can.  Unless you're very short on
RAM and drive space, there's no reason why you will have to give up X.
Get blackbox as your window manager (or wmaker, or your favorite
lightweight wm), and you'll at least be able to have a pile of xterms to
work with.

Slackware may seem daunting at first to someone without a lot of Linux
experience, but it's not that bad, and after installation, it's surely no
worse than a GUI-less Redhat.  If you start getting lost or unsure about
packages during the install, have another computer nearby and google
anything you're not sure about.  It may take a few tries but you'll be
able to get it up and going.

Keep notes, and let people know how it went.  A good description of what
you went through in a page, paper, or howto would probably help a lot of
other people out too.

Good luck,
Wesley

On Mon, 12 May 2003, Matthew Crape wrote:

> Hey all,
>
>     I am trying to create a somewhat 'standard' install that I can use for
> Red Hat. The main purpose for this box would to do scans (i.e. nmap) and
> maybe packet generation to test our firewall. Now I don't have a lot of
> Linux experience, but I want to install the minimal possible. The test
> machine that I am using is an old p 233Mhz - so in other words the first
> thing gone is the gui. Can anyone point me to some HOWTO or something like
> that? Thanks
>
> Matt


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