I have an old pentium pc with 2 gb harddisk. it's running win 98 now. i would like to install linux red hat 8.0 on it.(maybe 1 gb for win & 1 gb for linux) do i need a boot disk? i read from somewhere on the net that red hat 8.0 is bootable for installation. is 1 gb disk space enough for linux red hat 8.0? i'm really new to linux, can anyone suggest a site that provide step to step guide for installing linux? thanks!

1G each is too small. You should have at least 2-4G for redhat. also, any linux cd(iso) is bootable from cd.

how do i install linux? i have another hard disk which is 4 gb. do i just delete all partition, set cdrom as boot drive, insert red hat 8.0 cd and it will lead me to partition, format and install? thanks in advance.

Just for test purposes I installed RedHat 8.0 on an old PC system: Pentium 166, 64MB RAM, 6.4 GB HD I tried to install on a 1.6GB drive but it failed because I ran out of disk space. Your 4 GB drive should be big enough. Set the CD as the boot drive so Redhat can boot from it. RedHat will partition and format the disk for you. I would create a boot floppy in case the hard disk boot (GRUB or LILO) ever becomes corrupted. I now have RedHat on a much faster computer. It did work on the older computer. It was ok to play around with but was slugish using KDE or Gnome. Good luck.

so, if i just install linux on the pc as the only operating system, am i right to say that i don't need any boot utility like LILO or BOOT MAGIC. please forgive me if i sounds ignorant, i really knows nothing about linux. thanks.

RedHat 8.0 will ask you what boot manager to install on your hard drive. Your choice is GRUB or LILO. GRUB is the default. I use GRUB. It is a good idea to also make a boot floppy in case your hard disk boot info gets corrupted. You can then use the floppy to boot into linux. You can then go through the steps to restore your GRUB or LILO boot manager.