Chris Tyler - Fedora Linux

The first time you boot your freshly installed Fedora system, you will be asked a few questions to finish up the initial configuration. The display shown in Figure 1-34 will greet you; as you work through the questions, the arrow on the lefthand side of the screen will move downward to indicate your progress.

Figure 1-34. First boot welcome screen

Click Forward to proceed to the license-agreement screen. Read the license carefully, and then click Yes or No to indicate whether you accept the license terms.

Click Forward to enter the firewall configuration screen. I strongly recommend that you leave the firewall enabled, and that you initially select only ssh as a trusted service. You can loosen your firewall to permit other inbound services later, as you set those services up.

Click Next to proceed to SELinux configuration. SELinux hardens the Linux kernel against attack. Although it can be a bit difficult to configure at times, the protection that it provides is well worth the extra effort. SELinux is covered in more detail in Lab 8.2, "Using SELinux ." For now, leave the Modify SELinux Policy option at its default setting; you can always adjust SELinux later.

Click Forward to proceed to the date and time configuration screen. Select the current date by clicking on the calendar, and enter the current time into the fields provided.

If you have an always-on Internet connection, click on the Network Time Protocol tab. Select the checkbox labeled Enable Network Time Protocol. This will configure your system to communicate with timeservers on the Internet to keep the clock closely synchronized to official time. This is valuable because it ensures that time and date stamps on your system are always accurate.

You can edit the list of timeservers that can be contacted using the Add, Edit, and Remove buttons beside the server list. The NTP Server Pool Project maintains a pool of publicly accessible timeservers; the default server list ( 0.fedora.pool.ntp.org , 1.fedora.pool.ntp.org , and 2.fedora.pool.ntp.org ) configures your system to randomly select up to three timeservers from the pool at boot. To use a timeserver in your country, use your ISO country code as the hostname within the pool.ntp.org domain; I'm in Canada, so a server in my country could be found using the name ca.pool.ntp.org .

Click Next to proceed on to creating the first user. The root password that you entered during installation is used only for system administration and should not be used for day-to-day work. This screen lets you create the first user account; you can create as many additional accounts as you want later (see Lab 4.7, "Managing Users and Groups").

Fill in the four fields on this screen:

Username

Choose a username that contains no spaces and starts with a letter. This name will be used for logging in and will also serve as the user's local email address (typically, this is not intended to replace the email address you got from your ISP or mail provider; it is generally used to receive system notices and other local messages). I recommend using only lowercase letters, digits, underscores, and periods. If you are setting up a home or personal system, first names work well; for a corporate server, full names in firstname.lastname form reduce the likelihood of confusion between users (now and in the future).

Full name

Enter the user's full name (for example, Chris Tyler ).

Password

Enter a password that is easy to remember and hard to guess. Just like the root password, using the first letter from each word plus the punctuation from an obscure line of text can be helpful (for example, FL:AcgtRHcd. for "Fedora Linux: A complete guide to Red Hat's community distribution.").

If the button in the lower-righthand corner of the screen reads Forward, there is one more step. Click on that button to proceed to the the sound card check screen.

On this screen, click on the Play button (labeled ) and adjust the volume slider until you hear a guitar strum on the right, left, then the center channel of your sound system. If you don't hear anything, check your speaker power, physical volume control, and sound connections (if you have multiple sound cards, use the device tabs on the left side to switch between them), clicking Play after each adjustment (or just select the Repeat checkbox).

If you can't get sound working at this point, don't worry; you may just need access to some of the advanced mixer controls, which you can experiment with later (see Lab 2.6, "Configuring Sound ").

Click Finish. Congratulations, Fedora is installed and ready to use!

The Fedora Core installer is named Anaconda . It shares code and technology with several other tools, including:

yum, pup, and pirut

Tools for adding and removing software (see Chapter 5).

kudzu

A tool that checks the system at boot time to see if any hardware has been added or removed, and adjusts the system configuration appropriately.

system-config- component

Graphical tools to configure individual system components.

Because the hard disk is in an unknown state and the CD is not writable during the installation session, Anaconda uses a ramdisk an area of memory configured to act like a disk driveas the filesystem while it is running. After interacting with you to get the configuration details, Anaconda partitions and formats the hard disks and mounts them. It then starts installing RPM packages containing the selected software. Finally, it reboots the system.

Each time the system boots, the init script /etc/rc.d/init.d/firstboot is executed. If the file /etc/sysconfig/firstboot does not exist, the Python script /usr/sbin/firstboot is executed to ask the initial configuration questions.

Once the configuration details have been saved, the firstboot script exits and the normal boot sequence continues.

You can rerun the firstboot script by adding reconfig to the boot parameters when the system is started (boot parameters are entered in the same way as runlevels are during the boot process; see Lab 4.5, "Using Runlevels"). The sequence of steps used during a reconfiguration is slightly different and longer from that used when the script executes for the first time; for example, you can change the system's default language during reconfiguration.

If you are not using a bootloader password, then any user with physical access to your computer can reset the password of any account on the system using the reconfig boot argument.

Fedora is a community-based project, and the Fedora community is very helpful. The best places to turn for help are the Fedora Forum and the Fedora mailing lists. You can also access help using IRC (see Lab 9.2, "Using IRC ," for more information).

 The Fedora Core release notes: http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/release-notes/

 The Anaconda web page: http://fedora.redhat.com/projects/anaconda-installer/

 The manpages for kudzu and yum

 The Fedora Forum: http://fedoraforum.org