My Fedora Core 3 Linux Installation Expierience

In this article, I'm assuming you know very little about linux, but are familiar with windows.

Obtain the 4 ISOs from the website and burn to 4 CDs.

http://fedora.redhat.com/

Click Download and follow the instructions.

I used this free CD burner for Windows:
http://www.cdburnerxp.se/

You want to write/burn an ISO on to cd. Select the ISO and select "Finalize disc" and "Buffer protection".
Make sure you aren't doing anything else while burning, because the buffer may run out while the CPU is doing other things. (Ctrl-alt-delete to check)

After you have burned all the CDs, restart the target computer with the first one inserted. The CD should boot.
Use the graphical interface

The installer will ask you to check the CDs. Do it. I had to restart installing because of 2 or 3 bad CDs.

Choose custom install and automatic partition, but make sure to check it if you don't want your whole computer wipped out.
I used just one of my hard drives. The other still has the NTFS (Windows) file system on it with a bunch of files.

I believe the boot loader is pretty important, unless you want to always boot from CD or something weird like that.

DHCP in most cases for the network.

I said no firewall. I'm going to configure it later.

Warn (SELinux)

Root user is the main user of the system that can do everything.
Only be root when you have to. (change configuration, access certain protected files, etc)
Complete control of your system, so make the password good.

Here are the main server applications I'm going to use:

dovecot - imap, pop3 server
apache (httpd)- web server 
php - server-side scripting language mostly for dynamic websites
sendmail - send and recieve mail
mysql - database server (use with php)


OpenAFS install (to connect with AFS at UofM)

http://www.openafs.org/