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. Note, telephone support is only available with certain Red Hat Linux products. Please check your boxed set to see what types of support are available to you.

Red Hat Support will attempt to answer any questions you may have before the installation process is initiated. Depending on the product purchased, it can include the following:

• Hardware compatibility questions

• Basic hard drive partitioning strategies

Red Hat Support can provide the following assistance during the installation process:

• Installation of Red Hat Linux from a supported CD-ROM drive

• Assistance with configuring Red Hat Linux for use with certified or compatible hardware. Please see http://hardware.redhat.com for more information

• Assistance with hard drive partitioning, such as recommending a partition configuration or helping to configure hard drive partition tables.

• Configuring Red Hat Linux and Windows 9x, ME, NT, or 2000 to dual-boot using the Linux boot loaders GRUB or LILO (please note that third party boot loaders and partitioning software are not supported)

• Recommendations on the packages most important in setting a system up for a specific task or tasks

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

• Configuring the X Window System

• Configuring a local printer to print text

• Changing print options

• Configuring a mouse

• Local X Window System configuration

• Changing window manager/windowing environments

Tip

Red Hat Linux Support on Demand For individuals and small businesses, Red Hat's Support on Demand provides a cost-effective, flexible support program for your Red Hat Linux systems. Support on Demand provides installation assistance via telephone after your support subscription purchased with your official Red Hat Linux version has expired or for those who have downloaded Red Hat Linux. See http://www.redhat.com/services/techsupport/production/incident.html for more information.

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 online 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 also available. If you are new to Linux, a book that covers Linux basics will be invaluable. We can recommend several titles: The Official Red Hat Linux Getting Started Guide; Using Linux, by Bill Ball; Linux Clearly Explained, by Bryan Pfaffenberger; Linux for Dummies, by Jon "maddog" Hall; and Learning Red Hat Linux, by Bill McCarty.

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 at:

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