Question

Discuss the purpose of a bootable live media DVD image. Point out that if you write a live media DVD image to a blank DVD and boot your computer with it, a fully functional graphical Linux OS will be loaded into RAM and available for use.

Answer 1

In spite of the fact that installing software in Linux or Linux as an OS itself has been made pretty simple nowadays yet there are a great deal of errors amateur users make. For a stable installation we should follow certain rules. Careful planning is key here as we would need to configure different pieces of the Linux OS according to out required final result install.

Prior to installing Linux, we must check that our hardware meets minimum requirements of our distro in hand. Our CPU must be at least 200MHz to run smoothly. RAM memory should be as much as available but must be at least 256MB. Hard drive space would largely depend on the distro(flavor) of Linux in hand but we can sport a full-featured server in about 2GB. If we are installing GUI too then we’d rather spare at least 4-5GB. A CD-ROM or a USB secondary storage device which we’ll use to store the ISO or bootable image. A monitor & video card combination to display & works through the installation menu. A keyboard is a must to input commands and perform selections. A mouse often comes handy. A network interface to connect to your routers & switches.

After all that and selecting a distro of Linux we need to configure some parts of Linux as per our requirements. First we configure partitions, namely, the boot swap & root partition. A boot partition is where the kernel of the OS is & it’s responsible for booting the system. A swap partition can be thought of as an extension of RAM and is typically double of that of the RAM memory. A root partition is the actual partition that contains the OS files & the user data will also be store in here. Additional partitions & mount points can be at this stage as per requirement.

Now we configure the networking interface. Here we’ll quickly decide things like our host name, public IP subnet & mask, DHCP server, static IP of our server(if any), default gateway of our server, it’s DNS, etc.

Now in order to install Linux, we would basically require a bootable live media DVD image. This can be made using a blank DVD. We can use windows programs like Rufus to burn an ISO image of the Linux distro we want to install on the blank disc. Once it is done, we can boot our target system with the live bootable DVD & we will be greeted with a menu depending on the distro. Now we have a fully functional graphical Linux OS which is loaded into RAM and is available for our use.