Red Hat Linux 6.2: The Official Red Hat Linux Alpha/SPARC Installation Guide
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# Installation Overview

Installing Red Hat Linux on an Alpha system is slightly more complex than installing Red Hat Linux on an Intel machine because a variety of Alpha machine architectures exist and many different models are supported. In general, the sequence of steps to a successful installation are:

1. Create a kernel disk from the image available on the Red Hat Linux/Alpha CD.

2. Create a MILO disk, if necessary.

3. Create a RAM disk diskette, if you're doing an NFS, FTP or hard drive install.

4. Load and run the Red Hat Linux/Alpha kernel, and boot into the Red Hat Linux installation program using either the SRM console or MILO.

   | Please Note
   | If your system supports both the SRM console and MILO, using SRM is the preferred boot method, and is the boot method supported by Red Hat.

5. Install the bootloader on a small partition on your machine.

## Disk Space Required for Alpha Installations

For both MILO and SRM installations, you'll need a floppy drive: a 3.5 inch high density "A:" drive (/dev/fd0). (Optionally, most SRM installations can use the CD-ROM drive.)

Hard Drive Space:

- For a MILO installation, you'll need a 5 MB DOS-formatted partition to hold the MILO bootloader.

  If you're using SRM, you need free space at the beginning of the disk. If you do a workstation- or server-class installation and allow the installation program to partition for you, the installation program will take care of this requirement. If you're partitioning manually, however, you need to start your partitions at cylinder 2. If you try to start your partitions at cylinder 1, you'll see a warning message. Note that `Disk Druid` will not start the partitions at cylinder 1 during manual partitioning, but `fdisk` will.

- For both MILO and SRM, you'll need at least one swap partition. Optimally, the size of the swap partition is twice the RAM of your system, up to 2 GB.

- For both MILO and SRM, 900 MB is needed for a workstation-class installation.

- For both MILO and SRM, 1.8 GB is needed for a server-class installation, or for a custom-class installation (choosing everything).

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