General Installation Troubleshooting Tips

This section contains some random tips to help you through the installation process.

• Escaping to virtual consoles-During installation, it's possible to find out more about what is happening with the installation process than you can see from the main install screens. Using a set of Ctrl+Alt keystrokes, you can switch to different virtual terminals to see installation-related messages or even go to a shell prompt to run commands. Table 2-3 shows different key sequences (hold Ctrl and Alt keys as you press a function key).

  Table 2-3: Keys for Switching Virtual Terminals

  Keys	Terminal
  Ctrl+Alt+F1	Virtual console 1: Contains running installation dialog
  Ctrl+Alt+F2	Virtual console 2: Offers shell prompt to run commands as root user
  Ctrl+Alt+F3	Virtual console 3: Shows install log messages from installation program
  Ctrl+Alt+F4	Virtual console 4: Displays system-related messages
  Ctrl+Alt+F5	Virtual console 5: Displays other messages
  Ctrl+Alt+F7	Virtual console 7: Return to graphical installation screen

  Note

  You can use these same key sequences to switch between virtual consoles after instal-lation is completed. You can use these virtual consoles to have multiple login sessions, even while a graphical desktop is running.

• Changing partitions with fdisk or parted-Advanced users can use the parted, fdisk, or sfdisk commands to change partitions during the installation process itself. You do this by changing to a virtual console (Ctrl+Alt+F2) to get to a shell, then simply typing the command. Some features available through fdisk are not offered with Disk Druid; for example, more file system types are available through fdisk. Disk Druid also cannot resize partitions as parted can.

• Getting help during installation-During the installation process, you can view online help text by pressing F1, F2, F3, F4, F5, or F6 buttons. Each provides a different type of help information.

• Reading Release Notes-There is a lot of excellent information about the installation process in the Fedora Release Notes. To view the Release Notes from within any GUI install screen, click the Release Notes button on the bottom of the screen.

• Grabbing install screens-During graphical installs you can grab screenshots of any installation screen. To do this, press Shift+Print Screen to save the current screen to hard disk. You can repeat this as many times as you like. When installation is completed, you can find the screenshot(s) in the /root/anaconda-screenshots directory. (This feature is not supported in text-based installs.)

• Get the ks.cfg file for kickstart-You can use a kickstart file to answer installation questions, so you can run unattended installations of Fedora Core or Red Hat Linux distributions. After you have installed Fedora or Red Hat Linux, a file named anaconda-ks.cfg is created in the /root directory. You can use that kickstart file to reproduce the installation you just completed on another computer.

  Later, you can edit the anaconda-ks.cfg file with any text editor. You can also use the redhat-config-kickstart window to modify that file or create a new kickstart file.

  Note

  Refer to Chapter 4 for information on using the kickstart feature to create your own custom installs that you can use to automate the installation process for many computers.