An Overview of Red Hat Support

Red Hat provides installation assistance for Official Red Hat Linux boxed set products and covers installation on a single computer. This assistance is intended to help customers successfully install Red Hat Linux. Assistance with installation is offered via telephone and the web.

Red Hat Support will attempt to answer any questions you may have before the installation process is initiated. This includes the following:

• Hardware compatibility questions

• Basic hard drive partitioning strategies

Red Hat, Inc. Support can also provide assistance during the installation process:

• Getting supported hardware recognized by the Red Hat Linux operating system

• Assistance with drive partitioning

• Configuring Red Hat Linux and Windows 95 or Windows 98 to dual-boot using the Linux boot loader LILO (please note that third party boot loaders and partitioning software are not supported)

We can also help you with basic post-installation tasks, such as:

• Successfully configuring the X Window System using Xconfigurator

• Configuring a local parallel port printer to print text

• Configuring a mouse

Our installation assistance service is designed to get Red Hat Linux running on your system as quickly and as easily as possible. However, there are many other things that you may want to do with your Red Hat Linux system, from compiling a custom kernel to setting up a web server, which are not covered.

For assistance with these tasks, there is a wealth of on-line information available in the form of HOWTO documents, Linux-related websites, and commercial publications. The various Linux HOWTO documents are included with Red Hat Linux on the Documentation CD in the /HOWTOS directory. These HOWTOS are provided in text files that can easily be read from within Red Hat Linux and other operating systems.

A large number of Linux-related websites are available. The best starting point for finding information on Red Hat Linux is the Red Hat, Inc. website:

http://www.redhat.com/

Many Linux-related books are available. If you are new to Linux, a book that covers Linux basics will be invaluable. We can recommend several titles: Using Linux, by Bill Ball; Linux Clearly Explained, by Bryan Pfaffenberger; Linux for Dummies, by Jon "maddog" Hall; and A Practical Guide to Linux, by Mark G. Sobell.

Red Hat also offers various incident-based support plans to assist with configuration issues and tasks that are not covered by installation assistance. Please see the Red Hat Support website for more information. The Red Hat technical support website is located at the following URL:

http://www.redhat.com/support/