Install Fedora Button for LiveCD

[Pádraig Brady]

On 04/03/2012 02:26 PM, Kamil Paral wrote:
> I was quite depressed how hard it can be for a layman to find a way to install Fedora from LiveCD environment.

On a more general note it would be nice to stream-line the experience from web to installation.
Most of the hard parts are done, just a few steps to polish.

As a developer I don't read the docs and for ages have just:

wget -c ... # download live image (-c to resume partial)
ls -1 /sys/block | grep usb (To find USBDEV)
dd iflag=direct oflag=direct bs=1M if=file.iso of=/dev/$USBDEV
 (I use direct to avoid linux virtual memory stalls and cache eviction)

So as an experiment I tried as a new user would,
to see how easily they could come to an equivalent conclusion:

1a. Search for "install fedora" -> get.fedoraproject.org
 This is very good
1b. Search for "fedora linux" -> fedoraproject.org
 This is OK, but there are 6 download links on that page which is confusing.
 Also it mentions "CD-ROM" image which is no longer the norm.
 I'd just have "download development" linking to iso, and "download" linking to get.fedoraproject.org

2. To get to the default instructions for writing the image:
  http://fedoraproject.org/en/get-fedora (alias for get.fedoraproject.org)
    http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/16/html/Installation_Guide/Making_USB_Media.html (covers windows)
      http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/16/html/Installation_Guide/Making_USB_Media-UNIX_Linux.html
        3.2.2.1.1. Making Fedora USB Media with a graphical tool
          This erroneously mentions needing to enable EPEL.
          I also notice this pulls in lots of QT stuff to a default install (106MB!)
          So I insert my (existing F17) usb install disk and
          run the liveusb-creator GUI which outputs
            Unable to find any USB drives
            Enabling -v from the command line, gives:
              Skipping /dev/sdb with unknown filesystem: iso9660
  So apparently this tool is a higher level tool and doesn't support a mode
  where the image is simply written to the device.

I'll look at improving the Fedora docs as per the notes above.

> If you don't recognize the icon in Gnome Shell Overview mode, it can give you quite some work to find it.

To be precise, one has to:
 1. Click activities
 2. Click the hard drive "with a green hat on it"
I agree that's not immediately obvious.
So as to solutions:
1. Your suggestion of a persistent panel item is not ideal but better.
    This is a fine interim solution.
2. The suggestion of an earlier "install" or "boot live" option is good too, but a bit more invasive.
3. The suggestion of using notifications may be better but not until notifications are fixed:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14z4wdgNF9g

cheers,
Pádraig.