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Introduction

First I'll describe my setup, then I'll describe the physical aspects of doing the install, and lastly describe each screen in the installation.

The "Hardware"

Otherwise it's a pretty standard setup. A cdrom drive, and a 800m hard disk. The system is set to boot off the floppy, cd, and then the hd. The VM has 32megs of RAM.

The Physical Labor

The Process

Next there's the color/mono choice and then a screen giving a blurb about the manual. Next there are the standard set of screens in a RedHat install: keyboard (but with a larger number of them) and PCMCIA query. At this point it wants to autoprobe for hardware which like any lazy person I accept. Happily it seems to work.

Do I use Parallel Port IDE? No. Now it probes and failes to see my network card. There's a chance to fix that later it says, and then it moves onto a media selection screen like other Red Hat text installers (hereafter refered to as RHti). By the way, while the text based installers are kind of old and clunky these days I do think it's great that people are using the code. The usefulness of free software lies in it's reuse, so I don't think Turbo Linux are lame in the slightest for reusing Red Hat's work. Never having used SuSE I've heard that they have a nify ppp configurator/interface (wvdial) that it seems Red Hat has picked up.

Anyway, enough commentary, the install now wants to know how talkative it can be. I'll take the quiet default; I talk enough for the both of us. Network types follow, and I bravely pick LAN. Two RHti questions follow wanting to know if I have any SCSI devices (no) and how I want to partition the disk. The last one is a bit different because I can choose cfdisk. The partition scheme from LinuxPro is still there so I'll go with that. A host of RHti screens show up here: formatting swap partition, choosing a root partition, other mount points, making an ext2 fs on the partitions (formatting), network configuration (no bootp, just static), and the install log info message. Now I get to pick packages. It gives a list of canned installs so I just pick the File Server. It asks me to confirm and then starts installing.

Next you get a range of choices for a kernel. That seems nice. Next your standard LILO screens come up - placement and args. The timezone screen offers a time server choice, again a nice touch. A standard printer install screen, replaced afterwards with an isa pnp screen. I select yes, and the machine doesn't hang, but it doesn't say what it found. It does let me know how to configure them in the future.

No idea on what will start this up post install, but the Service Status Board is next. It configures which services start. This is nice since I get a chance to turn sendmail off and avoid the two minute addition to boot time it can cause if my network isn't set up just right. After this it requests a root password which I dutifully submit. It then let's me add users. I do wish these screens would let me enter a uid. In a networked UNIX office it seems easier if each user has a unique uid across platforms. Then again in a networked office you'd probably use NIS.

Finally it finishes with some useful info. On reboot I see it boots into framebuffer mode and finally get to see the infamous penguin with a beer image. That caused controversy? A quick peek around finds a pretty normal system - and since I only installed it as a file server there's no X installed.

Summary

Anyway Turbo Linux seems to present a rather straight forward install, though again it's not as simple as the Caldera and Corel's of the world. The package installs offer 98m to 800m+ systems so there seems to be a range of choices for deployment even before customizing the canned systems. The one failing here seems to be the inability to spot my network card (I think VMWare emulates an AMD card of some sort).

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