Next, the installation program needs to write a boot loader to your hard drive. The boot loader (LILO on Intel systems) is responsible for booting Linux along with any other operating systems if you have set up your system for multi-boot (see Section 4.8.1 for details on this).
The "Lilo Installation" dialog box will ask you to choose where the boot loader image should be written to. You'll likely want to install it on the master boot record of your first drive (usually /dev/hda for IDE, /dev/sda for SCSI).
Once you have selected the location for writing the boot loader, a second dialog box will appear, allowing you to enter extra boot-time configuration parameters. Usually you don't need to enter anything here, but if you have more than 64 Mb of RAM you'll need to enter a special parameter in order to have Linux make use of the extra RAM (otherwise, it will only use the first 64 Mb). For example, if your system has 128 Mb of RAM, you should enter:
If your system has SCSI drives, or you wish to install LILO on a partition with more than 1023 cylinders, it may be necessary to enable the option to "Use linear mode". If it is not, enabling this option shouldn't hurt anything, so it is probably a good idea to do so.
Finally, if you've set up your system to multi-boot Linux with other operating system(s), you'll be presented with a third dialog box which lists the available partitions. Here, you can assign names to your other operating systems (which you enter at the "LILO" prompt at boot time to boot your desired operating system. The installation program does assign default names to each bootable partition, so it isn't necessary to change them unless you don't like the defaults.
The default operating system that will boot upon system start up will, of course, be Linux. However, if you wish, you can change the default to any of the other operating systems you have defined.
After installing the boot loader on your hard drive, the installation program should hopefully present you with a "Congratulations" dialog box, indicating that Linux has been successfully installed. Remove the installation floppy diskette (if any), and press <Enter> to reboot your system...into Linux!
Linux will boot, and if all goes well you should see a "login" prompt. From here, you should be able to log in as "root" using whatever password you have assigned during the installation process.