Walking Through the Upgrade
Window Title	Prompt	Selection and/or Response
Language	"What language should be used?"	English/enter
Keyboard Type	"What type of keyboard do you have?"	US/enter
Installation Method	"What type of media?"	Local CDROM/enter
Note	"Insert your Red Hat CD into your CD drive now"	OK/enter
Installation Path	"Would you like to install? or upgrade?"	Upgrade/enter (Be sure that you select "upgrade" rather than "install.")
SCSI Configuration	"Do you have any SCSI adapters?"	Yes/No/enter
Gnome	"Would you like to have the GNOME desktop installed?	Yes/enter (GNOME is not required. It is one of two popular new window environments. I suggest you try it out.)
Upgrade Packages	"... would you like to customize ... ?"	No/enter
Upgrade Log	"a log of your upgrade will be saved in /tmp/upgrade.log"	OK/enter
Bootdisk	"Would you like to create a bootdisk?"	Yes/No/enter
Bootdisk	"Insert a blank floppy in the first drive /dev/fd0"	OK/enter
Lilo Installation	"Where do you want to install the bootloader?"	select/enter
Lilo installation	"Boot parameters"	OK/enter
Bootable partitions		select other boot partitions/enter
Done		OK/enter

Upgrade Problems

I encountered only one problem with my upgrade. Red Hat 5.2 allowed you to set up user accounts that did not have passwords, and so I had set up my personal login account without a password. Red Hat 6.0 seems to be more strict in this regard and requires user passwords. You can get around this, but not as easily as you could before. When my 6.0 upgrade was completed I found that I could no longer log in to my personal account. I logged in as root, reset my personal account password, and I was still not able to log in to my old personal account.

If you happen to run into this problem, there are a couple of ways to fix it. One way is to log in as root and then start linuxconf. Delete the user account but save all of its files first. Then create a new account with the same name and in the same home directory.

To do this using linuxconf, first select "Users Accounts->Normal-> User Accounts." Highlight the account you wish to delete and press the "Del" button. In the window that comes up (Figure 3) select "Leave the account's data in place" and press "Accept."

Figure 3: Leave an account's data in place.

Figure 4: Adding an account.

Now return to the "Users accounts" tab and press "Add" (Figure 4). Re-create the account using the same home directory.

Exit linuxconf by pressing the "Quit" button. Finally, while still logged in as root, go to the home directory of the user account you just re-created and at a shell prompt type:

cd username
chown-Rusername *

You should now be able to log in to your non-root user account again, and all of your original files should be preserved. If you can, while you are logged in as root and before you start, it is never a bad idea to back-up your user account's files, just in case. That way you'll always be able to get yourself out of any trouble you might accidentally get yourself into.

Until next month, have fun!

Starting Directly into X Say that you're running Red Hat 5.2 or some other distribution and you have no need or intention to upgrade. X is working for you. When you boot your computer you log in to the command line interface and manually start X with the startx command. You want to skip the command line and boot directly into X. No problem. Open up the file /etc/inittab on your system, and in that file look for the line that reads: id:3:initdefault . Change the 3 to a 5 , so that you have id:5:initdefault . You can use any text editor to change the file. Be careful that you don't change anything else. In fact, I recommend that you save a backup version of the /etc/inittab file somewhere before you alter anything. That way, if things go wrong, you can always revert to the old version of inittab. The next time that you start your computer, X will start automatically. You no longer have to log in and start X from the command line.

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Hal Moroff has been developing UNIX systems and applications for 20+ years. He's new enough to Linux that he's finding new things every day. He can be reached at .