Installation guide

Chapter 4. Installing Red Hat Enterprise Linux 17

4.3.3. Additional Boot Options

While it is easiest to boot using a CD-ROM and perform a graphical installation, sometimes there

are installation scenarios where booting in a different manner may be needed. This section discusses

additional boot options available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

For Itanium users:

To pass options to the boot loader on an Itanium system, enter the following at the EFI Shell prompt:

elilo linux option

For x86, AMD64, and Intel® EM64T users:

To pass options to the boot loader on an x86, AMD64, or Intel® EM64T system, use the instructions

as provided in the boot loader option samples below.

Note

Refer to Appendix F Additional Boot Options for additional boot options not covered in this section.

• To perform a text mode installation, at the installation boot prompt, type:

linux text

• ISO images have an md5sum embedded in them. To test the checksum integrity of an ISO image,

at the installation boot prompt, type:

linux mediacheck

The installation program prompts you to insert a CD or select an ISO image to test, and select OK

to perform the checksum operation. This checksum operation can be performed on any Red Hat

Enterprise Linux CD and does not have to be performed in a speciﬁc order (for example, CD #1

does not have to be the ﬁrst CD you verify). It is strongly recommended to perform this operation on

any Red Hat Enterprise Linux CD that was created from downloaded ISO images. This command

works with the CD, DVD, hard drive ISO, and NFS ISO installation methods.

• Also in the images/ directory is the boot.iso ﬁle. This ﬁle is an ISO image than can be used

to boot the installation program. To use the boot.iso, your computer must be able to boot from

its CD-ROM drive, and its BIOS settings must be conﬁgured to do so. You must then burn the

boot.iso ﬁle onto a recordable/rewriteable CD-ROM.

• If you need to perform the installation in serial mode, type the following command:

linux console=<device>

For text mode installations, use:

linux text console=<device>

In the above command, <device> should be the device you are using (such as ttyS0 or ttyS1).

For example, linux text console=ttyS0.

Text mode installations using a serial terminal work best when the terminal supports UTF-8. Under

UNIX and Linux, Kermit supports UTF-8. For Windows, Kermit ’95 works well. Non-UTF-8 ca-

pable terminals works as long as only English is used during the installation process. An enhanced

serial display can be used by passing the utf8 command as a boot-time option to the installation

program. For example:

linux console=ttyS0 utf8