Ground Control

I'm using the PCLinuxOS Minime distro, that way I can add just what I need, the disk is in an external drive, no other drives attached and I've told the machine to boot from an external drive.

 Once the machine starts booting you should see this screen initially, just press return on the top option.

After some time and much whirring of the CD , you should finally get to see this screen.

It defaults to te UK, but select the country you want to use and click on Next at the bottom.

Again much whirring.

And eventually you will arrive at the KDE4 desktop.

At the moment the desktop is set to accept single clicks, I prefer doub le clicks so once the install is complete we can change that setting. In the meantine click on the icon marked Install PCLinuxOS.

Then enter the administrator password which at the moment is root as shown at the top of the screen.

It's not hard to guess what to do at this screen.

So many people have so many different opinions about how to partition a drive, but in this case I'm just going to devote the whole of the partiton to the operating system and not use a seperate /home partition.

This means selecting the Custom Disk Partitioning option and then clicking on next.

There is an exisitng partition on this drive so I need to remove it first, easiest thing to do is click on the Clear All option which removes everything.

Then click on the area underneath the hard drive device, in this case SDA and then on the create button.

You can now resize your partition and once more I'm not bothered with working out the optimal size for a swap partition, just move the slider all the way over to the right and then back a little bit,

Put a / in the bottom box to show how the drive will be mounted, then click on OK

And thenclick on the bit that's left on the top right of the drive and click on create.

Then select Linux swap and move the slider all the way to the right and then click on OK

Now click on Done and iit's at this point that the installation may require a reboot and you have to go through this process one more time. In this case it's just gone straight on.

You will get a warning that the drive is going to be formatted, I'm happy about that so I'm going to click on OK.

And the install routine now goes off all by itself, I'll let you go through the various screens you will see until we get to the next stage.

After a while you should then get to this screen, just go for Next.

Then Finish.

And then finally Finish again.

You can either power the machine down now or click on the PC button and then Leave. Powering the machine off will cause no problems as the file system that's been in operation is on the CD and can't be corrupted.

And that's the install completed.

So the OS is now installed and it's time to power it up and continue with the setting up process, once it's turned on this screen should appear. You don't need to do anything but you can select the top option and press enter to speed it up a bit.

It then goes off and does it's bits and pieces.

And then will ask you to create a password for the root user, put one in that you will remember and click next.

You are then asked to create a user, you should alway use this to logon to the machine and never logon as root.

Once you have filled  in all the details click on next.

Which will then bring you to the main login screen, just click on your username, type in your password and click on Login.

You see some pretty little pictures as the desktop loads.

And then finally you will be sitting at your desktop, that wasn;t too hard was it?

This is going to take a little while now, first we are going to setup the network and then set up the operating system completely for your location. As I'm a Sci Fi fan, I'm going to call the machine Andromeda and give it a fixed ip address of 192.168.1.254, my router is at 192.168.1.1.

So first of all click on the Configure Your Computer icon on the taskbar at the bottom of the screen.

Then type in your root password.

You should then see this screen.

Click on Network and Internet on the left hand side and then Setup a New Network Interface on the right hand side.

The EEE Box has wireless but I'm going to ignore, the wireless drivers are built into the distribution and the setup is easy. As this is going to be a server, let's setup the wired interface so select that and click next.

It's picked up the card so just click on next.

We're going to go for a manul configuration, so select that option and click on next.

Fill in the boxes with the details for your network.

Here's what mine looks like when filled in, once you've completed this screen click on next.

Leave this on the yes option and click on next.

The OS then starts up the network drivers with your settings and you should get a pop up on the bottom indicating it's completed succesfully.

Once it's done that click on finish.

You should then be back at this screen, you can close this down as we've finished with it for the moment.

Next we are going to set the OS up so that it works correctly for your geographic location, click on the Add Local option on ths screen.

Enter your root password.

The machine checks you are connected to the Internet.

You will then get this screen, just click on OK

And then you will get this dialogue box, it tells you to click on OK but you may notice that OK is spelt YES.

Select your contry from the list and click on OK

And it goes off on it's own downloading some stuff.

Just click OK here, no other option.

More downloading happens.

FOllowed by some installing.

And then you are asked to confirm the keyboard type, once you've done that click on OK.

And once again, click on the Yes button not OK as it says in the text.

You are then asked to confirm the settings.

Select your time zone.

Onc you've click on OK you will see this messagem if you clock on Yes you may notice that you then get the wrong time displayed. Don't worry about this at the moment.

Pop a tick in the box to enable Network Time Protocol.

Select a server near you and then click on OK.

And then OK on this screen and the machine will reboot.

Once it's back up and you've logged in again there's a little bit more confirmation of the settings to do.

At this point you can remove any surplus keyboard settings by clicking on them and on remove at the bottom.

Once you've doen all that click on Apply and then OK, you will then get this box up so click on OK again.

Just OK on this screen.

And that's it, it's all setup for your location now.

What we are going to do next is configure the repositories for the software and get all the latest updates. Thankfully, there is a tool that checks for the fastest repository for you and then configures the package manager with these settings.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so just follow each of these steps to configure the software repository initially.

At this point, the fastest repository for you is listed at the top, so click on this and then on OK.

Click OK here.

And then Yes

Now enter your root password.

And then finally OK to accept the suggested repository.

That's the reposiories all set up, now we get the updates, so click on Reload at the top, this will query the repository and download the latest list of software.

Then click on Mark All Possible Upgrades

Click on Mark to accept the suggestions.

And then Apply to start the download and install process.

Once you click on Apply it will go away and start the install process.

Once it's completed, you may get some messages like this, just click on close.

And finally you will be back here, once you are close this window down.

Say yes to this and then reboot the machine to ensure all the updates are in place.

That wasn't too bad and so far we haven't used the command line for anything,