1. Preliminaries

Blue / Linux for DOS / Windows is available from the Basser Department of Computer Science on CD-ROM, floppy disks or at the following URL:

http://www.sd.monash.edu.au/blue/

If you already have a full Linux system installed then you should not install the Blue / Linux for DOS / Windows package. Instead, you should obtain then Blue for Linux package, available on CD-ROM or from the URL above.

1.1 System Requirements

The main thing you will need is a computer to install the software on. The computer must satisfy the following:

• it must be a 386 or better PC compatible computer.
• it must have at least 8M of RAM.
• it must have around 40M of free disk space (preferably on the C: drive).
• it must have DOS or Windows 95 installed.

1.2 Information about your computer

You will need to know some things about your hardware, including:

• what kind of video card you have, and what chipset it is based on. If you're not sure about what video card you have, that's okay. There is a program which will attempt to probe for it that you can run during the installation.
• what kind of mouse you have (e.g. Microsoft, Logitech, etc) and what port it is connected to.
• (optional) what kind of CD-ROM you have (specifically, whether it is an IDE CD-ROM, and if so, whether it is the primary slave, secondary master, etc.).

1.3 The distribution files

You will need to somehow get access to the Blue Linux distribution files. These can be obtained on CD-ROM or floppies from the Basser Department of Computer Science, or over the web from the URL given above. Section Getting the files details how to install the files depending on which of these methods you choose.

1.4 What you will get when you are finished

After a successful installation, you will have:

• a Linux operating system and a set of basic utilities, installed on a DOS partition.

  Aside: for those who wish to know, this distribution is based on the RedHat 4.1 distribution of Linux. The included packages are listed in section Installed packages.

• an X server for displaying graphics on your monitor.
• the Blue and Red programs developed at the University of Sydney.