Hi Armelius,
On Tue, 2011-01-18 at 12:39 -0500, Armelius Cameron wrote:
Hello,
I know Fedora try to be more user friendly, and the website design that points
to the various download options reflects that. But I think one signficant thing
is missing: the CHECKSUM file is not easily accesible. How can a novice user
know how to check that his/her download is correct and not corrupted ?
From talking to numerous novice users in the design of the site
I'm not
convinced that a checksum file is something that novice users are aware
of or much concerned about. The main download link points directly to
Fedora's main server, not a mirror, so they'd be downloading the
checksum from the same source as the payload anyway. When you burn the
iso to media it has a built-in media check as well which would protect
against corruption (although in observing user installs, I've found a
lot of folks simply skip that as well.)
Following the link to get fedora from the main page, I ended on this
page:
http://fedoraproject.org/en/get-fedora-options#formats
Since I want to get the full DVD install, I follow the link to:
http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora/linux/releases/14/Fedora/x86...
x86_64-DVD.iso
That goes to a page that tells me that the download would start shortly (and
it did), but no information about how to check the correctness of the
downloaded file.
There's this box that says: "What should I do with this ISO file?" and a
link
to instruction. The second page on the instruction ask to "Verify the
download", but again, no link to point to the CHECKSUM, or how to even verify
the download.
There is a link to 'Verify download' on every one of the download pages
in the right-hand column. That being said, it doesn't appear on the
post-download splash and we would be happy to consider adding a link to
the verify page (
https://fedoraproject.org/en/verify ).
Sure, I can figure out just fine that I can browse the download
directory
manually, get the CHECKSUM, and verify it with 'sha256sum' utility. But how
about Aunt Tillie ? How about people who uses Windows to download and may not
have the utility handy ? should there be at least a link to the CHECKSUM file,
or even just display the hash there on the download page, and a quick
instruction on how to check the download ?
I need to point out that I'm not happy about women being used as
examples of novice users. Again though, 'Uncle Bob' likely doesn't know
or care about checksums.
~m