Caos-NSA 1 Installation

Introduction

You will be refreshed as to how painless installing Linux can be with Caos-NSA. This walkthrough describes a basic system installation of Caos-NSA using default options. Alternate configuration options will be described in other articles, although you will find our system configuration toolkit, Sidekick, to be easy to use for setting up your system. To begin you should have burned a downloaded ISO image from our mirror to a CD and placed it in your computer, with the BIOS settings set to boot from the optical drive before the hard disk.

[edit] Installation

After booting from the Caos-NSA 1 CD, you will see our boot prompt and installation information screen:

"autoinstall" is the command to use to install Caos-NSA to your system. You can also test your system for compatibility, demo Caos-NSA without installation, or boot into a rescue prompt. Know that "autoinstall" is a merciless automatic installer that will wipe out the data on your first hard disk and repartition it without any prompt or warning, so you must be sure that is what you want to do before issuing that command. If you need to install Caos-NSA to a specific hard disk or partition, append the "layout=manual" boot option to the "autoinstall" command, and you will be able to fdisk your drive and configure your fstab as you desire. This walkthrough covers the "autoinstall" command with no boot options used, as it is effective for most system installations.

The installation of Caos-NSA to your hard disk does not take very long. When it is finished you will be presented with an option to reboot your computer or enter a debug shell.

If all is well reboot the computer by pressing enter. The CD will be ejected and the computer will reboot. The bootloader Grub will launch Caos-NSA. Your network card should be detected and will seek out an IP address over DHCP for this first boot to allow you to update your system to the most current packages during the initial configuration. If you do not have network connectivity configuration is still possible, but the steps requiring an Internet connection will be skipped. After Caos-NSA boots you will be brought to the Sidekick system configuration toolkit.

Sidekick is navigated with the arrow keys, enter, tab, and the space bar. Arrows up and down change menu choices, arrows left and right will select command choices at the bottom (such as "OK" and "Cancel"), tab will move the cursor from the menu list to the commands, and the space bar will check or uncheck menu selections. Letters in red are hot-keys for that choice. Make selections and enter commands with enter.

[edit] System Settings

Sidekick first asks to configure you keyboard to one of many international keymaps. Select your system's locale and press enter.

Once selected it will give you an opportunity to test your keyboard setting to verify if it is correct.

Next Sidekick will ask for the root password to be set. Choose a strong password, as it is important that your root account is secure.

Next verify your root password to check for typing mistakes.

Sidekick will then ask for the email address of the administrator of the system. Know that this is only for important system notifications and will not be used for any unsolicited reason. Caos Linux respects the privacy of it's users!

Next provide Sidekick with the name of the system administrator. This goes into the user database, and is part of setting up the administrator user account.

Now enter the account name for the system administrator. It is generally a bad idea to administer your system logged in as root all the time. This administrator account will be granted sudo privileges automatically, so it can be used to fully administer the system using the sudo command.

Follow that with the account password...

and confirm it.

Sidekick will then ask you to set the timezone for your system. First select the general area of the world your system located at.

Next set the specific time zone.

Sidekick will next run a network connectivity test to several servers to check to see if you have a working connection to the Internet.

[edit] Software configuration

If all is well with your network, you will be asked if you want to update the package list from the software repositories. For the most up-to-date system, you will want to do this.

The progress of this process will be displayed.

Now it is time to select the profile for the system. Choose the profiles that match what the system will be used for, or what optional functions you would like your system to have and select "OK". Each of the profile options will shown in further detail in the following sections.

Most of the profiles do not require any options or settings for installation. This is done for the sake of speed and simplicity, so the installation of your system does not require unnecessary prompts for information. If a deviation from the standard installation is required on your system you may alter settings manually in the config files or by launching Sidekick after installation is complete.

[edit] Configuring GUI

This profile installs the lightweight XFCE desktop environment on your system, as well as setting the runlevel for it to launch at startup. No configuration options are necessary, so you will not be prompted for any.

[edit] Configuring Email

This profile installs, configures, and activates the software needed for your system to be an incoming Email server. It will prompt you to fill out personal information for the SSL certificate you will be using, but this step is optional.

If 'Yes' is selected, you will be notified and taken to a text input screen.

[edit] Configuring LAMP

This profile installs and configures Apache and hardened PHP, making your system a fully functional web server. If MySQL database services are necessary from this system, select the "Database" profile as well. It is not necessary to set any options at this point for your web server, so you will not be prompted for any. The contents of /var/www/html/ will be the hosted web content of your system.

[edit] Configuring File Server

This profile installs and activates various file-sharing services to your system. These include the traditional login/checkout FTP server, Samba and NFS mapped drive shares, and iSCSI, the file share mapped as raw hardware. Portmap and Apache (minus the rest of LAMP) are also included. This profile requires no installation or configuration options, so none will be asked for.

[edit] Configuring Database

This profile configures and activates the MySQL database service. The profile is isolated from the LAMP web server profile so it is possible to set up a dedicated MySQL database box without the web hosting services. The installation of this profile will not prompt you for any options or information, so set up your database users from the command-line when the Sidekick configuration is complete.

[edit] Configuring Virtualization

This profile installs and enables the Kernel-based Virtual Machine solution KVM. Activate this profile if you intend to host virtual machines on your system, or you wish to use Abstractual, Infiscale's VM management software. No options are necessary, so none will be prompted for.

[edit] Configuring Clustering

Because the "Clustering" profile was selected Perceus will automatically be installed and configured to it's default state. Sidekick displays this to you, but if you aren't watching you may miss this exciting step! (The next step does wait for your input, so no worries if you do miss it.)

When Perceus is successfully installed you will be prompted to download a VNFS capsule to use to provision your nodes. There are a few choices, but we'll go with the compute capsule. Cloud provisioning and Intel Cluster Ready capsules are the other options at this time.

Sidekick will next show you the latest VNFS capsule available from the download mirror and ask your confirmation to download and import it.

You will see the progress of this.

[edit] Configuring ICR

This profile installs the software packages necessary to make your system compatible with the Intel Cluster Ready program, certifying that your clustering software and Intel-based hardware are compatible. No installation options are necessary for this profile.

[edit] Configuring Development

This profile installs the compilers, toolchains, libraries, headers, and other tools necessary for modern software development. Caos-NSA is on the cutting edge with GCC 4.3.3 and other latest development packages. There are no installation or configuration options for this profile, so none will be asked for. It is one of the larger metapackages, so expect your download and installation time for this profile to be longer than most of the others.

[edit] Configuring X-Development

This profile further builds upon the "Development" profile to add support for developing applications for the X GUI environment. It is not necessary for most development, only that which is specifically for X applications. There are no installation options, so none will be asked for. This also is a large metapackage, so expect download and installation times to be greater than with most other profiles.

[edit] Configuring Laptop

This profile installs and configures optimizations for mobile systems, such as power management controls to increase battery life. If you are installing Caos-NSA on a laptop, netbook, or other portable system, this profile will be of great benefit. There are no configuration options, so none will be prompted for.

[edit] Configuring GL

This profile installs and activates GL 3D rendering support for graphics cards that can utilize it. If you have an Nvidia or similar 3D accelerated graphics adapter, than you can take advantage of this profile. There are no installation options for this profile.

[edit] Conclusion

Once all the selected profiles are downloaded, installed, and configured, your system installation is complete! Your system will reboot and start up after this into the appropriate runlevel for your installation (varying only if the GUI profile was selected or not.) Sidekick can be launched at any time from the terminal or command-line by typing sudo sidekick to configure all aspects of your system. We hope your Caos-NSA experience is a good one!