Projects: Install RHEL 8 on my PC

I realised recently that the only RHEL 8 VM I had was the earliest RHEL 8 beta 1 insall, and decided to change this. I downloaded RHEL 8 release ISO and created a few VMs, but then went further and actually installed it on my PC.

Project Prerequisites

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 ISO image downloaded – available for free as part of Red Hat Developer subscription – to be clear, it's a free subscription
• 16GB USB stick (although 8GB might have been enough – ISO image is slightly less than that I think)
• Procedure for burning ISO image onto USB in macOS
• Spare hard disk space – 20GB recommended, but much more is actually needed if you plan hosting virtual machines
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 subscription for activating software updates on your new RHEL 8 system (can be created from Red Hat support portal).

Hard Disk Layout

I have found a brand new 1.5TB disk that’s 6 years old – received it as a warranty replacement for one of my early NAS systems but never found any use since I upgraded to 3TB disks by then.

So the plan is to use this new 1.5TB for just the RHEL 8 installation. I don’t like the default layout suggested because it would put about 1.3TB of this space into /home which is hardly the sensible choice. So I’m going to split all this vast space into multiple filesystems I’m used to:

• The usual filesystems
  • / – 20GB
  • /home – 50GB
  • /var – 10GB – sometimes you get software install tons into this directory. MySQL, Confluence (Wiki) and other things are usually there. /var/www is also pretty common for web server content.
  • /var/log – 20GB just in case
  • swap – 2GB? don't think I'll ever need it, that PC system has 16GB of RAM
• Additional filesystems
  • /dist – 200GB – this is my download and long term package/software storage folder – I download recent software into this and then install from there. If there is plenty of space there, I don't delete multiple versions of downloads so that I can always revisit and retry stuff.
  • /storage – rest of storage, about 1TB – this is the common area for high-volume storage needs like VM images, Docker repository, RPM repos and so on. I would go and symlink to this from various default locations, if needed.

Newly Built RHEL 8 PC

Excellent! Here’s my new RHEL 8 system, plenty of space and power for all sorts of experiments towards my future RHEL 8 RHCSA/RHCE certifications!

System Information

Processor: AMD A8-6500, 4 cores @ 3.5GHz
Memory: 16GB RAM
Disks: 1.5TB HDD
Network: 1Gbit Ethernet

ScreenFetch in RHEL 8

Disk layout

[root@rhel8 ~]# df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
devtmpfs        7.8G     0  7.8G   0% /dev
tmpfs           7.8G     0  7.8G   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs           7.8G   19M  7.8G   1% /run
tmpfs           7.8G     0  7.8G   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/dm-2        19G  3.7G   15G  20% /
/dev/sdc1       575M  135M  399M  26% /boot
/dev/sdc2       571M  6.6M  565M   2% /boot/efi
/dev/dm-9       9.4G  264M  9.1G   3% /var
/dev/dm-11       19G  173M   19G   1% /var/log
/dev/dm-10      187G  1.4G  185G   1% /dist
/dev/dm-12       47G  376M   47G   1% /home
/dev/dm-13      1.1T  7.8G  1.1T   1% /storage
tmpfs           1.6G   20K  1.6G   1% /run/user/42
tmpfs           1.6G  3.5M  1.6G   1% /run/user/1000

Project Summary

I’m happy with how this project went: with all the prerequisites available and steps documented it would take less than 2h from start to finish to complete.

RHEL 8 had no problem recognising my mix of old hardware and recent hardware, including using native resolution 2560×1440 on my 27" monitor – even for the installer.

Bare metal performance is unmatched! You simply forget how powerful your computer is when you use Linux VMs installed on top of Windows OS. All virtualization solutions would have certain overheads, so when you install Linux on bare metal it’s always a shock just how fast everything is (even in my case, when I’m running of HDD rather than SSD).