This laboratory exercise shall familarize the student with some checks and troubleshooting that can be conducted after a Red Hat installation.  If your installation has gone very smoothly then this exercise may seem worthless.  A word to the wise, don't overlook these post installation steps because they will eliminate problems in the future.

• Did you create a boot disk during the installation?  Check it now!  Don't wait till you need the boot disk to find that it doesn't work.  When using the boot disk the system will enter runlevel 1.  If you didn't create a boot disk at the time of the installation, one can be creaated when an upgrade is conducted.  When you conduct a minimum upgrade don't choose any applications, simply upgrade the boot loader and the process will take very little time.  When the upgrade is completed (takes about 30 seconds) select to create a boot disk.
• Is your system one which doesn't have a floppy drive?  Then your system can be booted from the CDROM even if you need to rescue the system.  A boot disk created on another system could possibly used on your system with a USB floppy drive.  This is a wonderful convenience.  What do you do if your CDROM fails.  Well, you'll need a boot installation disk (bootdisk.img).  On page 60 of your textbook is a procedure to write the bootdisk.img file to a floppy.  If you have a USB floppy the output file option on the 'dd' command line will need to be changed from 'of=/dev/fd0' to 'of=/dev/sda'.  
• Review the log files for the installation/upgrades conducted on your system.  These reveal what occurred during the installation/upgrade.  Refer to page 70 of your textbook to identify these files and their locations.
• Review the hardware installed during your installation using the Hardware Browser utility.
• Network Cards may not be configured at the time of the installation.  If this occurs you'll need to configure the NIC manually.  Using the 'netconfig' utility at command line or the Internet Configuration Wizard.  Reference the laboratory exercise entitled 'Configuring Hardware' for additional help.
• After reviewing the hardware, you may find that your sound card wasn't recognized during the installation.  Difficulties with Sound Cards have to be approached using the Sound Card procedure from the linuxindayton website.  The utility needed to manually configure legacy sound cards is 'sndconfig'.  The installation of this utility is covered in the laboratory exercise entitled 'Installing RPM Packages'.  The use of this utility 'sndconfig' is covered in the laboratory exercise entitled 'Configuring Hardware'. 

Some additional utilities that can be used to evaluate and/or alter your installation are; authconfig, Xconfigurator, mouseconfig, ntsysv, sndconfig, and timeconfig.  The experienced system administrator can start the appropriate utility by simply typing in the command directly or by using the 'setup' utility.  Refer to page 70 of your textbook for additional utilities.