Assuming you have completed lab #4, your task is to use the spare disk space on your drive to install another OS, and to set up your drive to be able to boot to either OS using Grub. This must be a regular installation, not a virtual installation (e.g., with VMWare or equivalent). This is a common situation -- one OS might be the stable, regular OS, while the other might be a new, beta version that you want to test. A sysadmin may in fact want to have many OSes installed, perhaps at least one for every OS that must be supported for the organization. For an extreme case, take a look at the many OSes installed on one PowerBook.
The usual process of installing an OS is to reboot your machine using one or more boot floppies or CDs, and install from either a set of CDs, or remotely via FTP or HTTP, etc., as we did in our first lab. The somewhat unusual aspect of this project is that you are not permitted to use a floppy or CD (or any other removable media, such as USB key chain).
Your task is to install a second OS on your removable drive for the sandbox lab machines, without using any other removable media such as floppy disk or CD-ROM. You may use any OS other than any version based on Red Hat (e.g., not CentOS or Fedora). Pretty much any Linux distribution will work, and probably OpenSolaris and the *BSDs, too.
I recommend that you consider using a mirror site (if available) as the source for the OS (you'll probably be installing more than 1GB), and that you choose a mirror that is hosted by an educational institution, as Lehigh will have better connectivity (a mostly unused 100Mbps Internet2 link) to most US universities.
What you'll need to hand in by email to the cse265 account: a two page (minimum) report of the process that you followed.
A successful installation with a well-written report will get full credit (that is, your writing will be assessed as well as what you write). Note that for this writeup, feel free to send me PDF (or even Word or OpenOffice files) as I will be printing them.
Finally, this is a non-trivial assignment. Installing an OS can be quite slow, and you may need to use resources (such as mirror sites, the Internet, etc.) that are not always dependable. Plus, some of these open source versions of UNIX are fairly different from RHEL, so there will be a learning curve. It is extremely unlikely that you will be able to complete it the day before it is due. Many of you will make mistakes along the way -- in some cases you may need even to start over by re-imaging your hard drive, re-doing the actions we did in lab, and re-start this project. So, I strongly suggest that you start early. One place to start will be to read the installation instructions for the OS that you plan to install.
The requirement to not create or use removable media is unusual but not totally out of the question -- many people administer dedicated machines that are hosted hundreds or thousands of miles away from the administrator.