My little introduction

Installing Linux.

Networking your box.

Locking your box down.

Configuration tweaks.

A few invaluable utilities.

My pickings of the available software.

Linux links, bookmark them now.

Partitions

The big question for new users is partitioning... how much and what should be seperate?

This is my generic space recommendation for an X workstation with a reasonable size HDD:

Total Used is aprox 5GB

If you have more space to share then I'd recommend allocating more to /home and /usr as you see fit. NB, like everything else on my website, it's purely a guide, if it doesn't work for you then let me know.

N.B. Standard partioning rules apply. The /boot partition should be within the first 1024 cylinders to enable lilo to boot from it. If you are unable to do this then consider the use of grub or loadlin.

Location of files and RPM's

Finding files: Use which to get the full path of the file

# which ping

/bin/ping

Then use the rpm command to find which RPM it came from:

# rpm --redhatprovides /bin/ping

iputils-20001110-1

Recompiling RPM's to the correct architecture

Get the program_name.src.rpm then use rpm -i on it.

Then go into /usr/src/redhat/SPECS and edit the spec file for the optimizations you want. Then recompile with rpm -ba < specfile_name >. Of course if you just want to optimize for i686, this can usually be done (if the specfile is done right to begin with) by doing:

rpmbuild --rebuild program_name.src.rpm --target=i686

To confirm the target architecture

# more /etc/rpmrc

# default target is i386

buildarchtranslate: i686: i686