I did it!

[Debbie Deutsch]

Paul W. Frields wrote:
> 
> We've thrown around the idea of a System Planning Guide, which would go
> hand-in-hand with the Installation Guide, and talk about some of these
> very basic UNIXish issues in a way that beginners could understand.  It
> helps, when going through the Installation Guide, to know how to make
> the right choices when the installer gives you options.
> 
> I hope that you will be able to stay on track with the account setup
> documentation, but it also makes great sense for someone with fresh eyes
> to help us tackle this System Planning Guide as ewll.
> 
> 

I could really have used a system planning guide over the past few
months.  I have built two systems from scratch.  I had only built one
Linux system before, and that was years ago.  (By coincidence, the
second system used a hard drive that was transplanted from the corpse of
another system that had gone belly-up.  It was nine years old, poor
thing.)

My view of myself is I am fairly ignorant when it comes to the details
of how Linux works, but pretty knowledgeable about computer systems in
general.  I am probably more confident of my ability to take on projects
that are likely to become learning experiences and/or adventures than
most people would be.  Nevertheless, neither build was easy.  The first
one involved some cutting-edge software.  The system, which uses an
nVidia nForce4 chipset, was supposed to boot off a RAID 0 array.  Oh my
goodness!  Going with the 64-bit FC5 distribution has only made things
more interesting.  :-)  It was this experience, scrounging for
documentation and anything that might give me a clue about what was
going wrong and why, that convinced me that I should contribute to the
docs project.

The good news is I have learned a lot along the way.  I have gotten a
lot of experience with anaconda, heh.

On the other hand, I still wish I had access to a nice document to
confirm, one way or another, my theories about how much space to devote
to various partitions.  I ran across a nice discussion of how much you
need in swap, and /boot takes care of itself.  However, how much to give
to /root or /home (given various scenarios for how you intend to use the
system) still seems a bit of a black art to me.  There are probably a
bunch of other configuration choices that are like that.  Without
experience administering a system, it is hard for a novice to Linux or
Fedora to know what choices to make, or even how important they are to
get right (or not).

The other thing my experience tells me is that a system planning guide
might attempt to advise the novice on some other basic topics:

- which release to use.  Someone who wants the most stable system with
fewest updates today should probably use FC4, not FC5.

- what configurations are the easiest for a beginner.  We all would like
to say that FC is easy to install right out of the box.  It certainly is
for some configurations.  However some features and drivers are more or
less baked than others.  For a novice I would recommend no RAID, 32-bit,
no nVidia drivers.  There's probably a lot more that can be said on this
subject.

- troubleshooting basics.  How to get into linux rescue mode using your
boot disk, and what you can do there.  Some more common problems, their
symptoms, and how to confirm if that's what has happened to you.  Where
to look for more help if you need it.

Anyway, that's some grist for the mill!

Cheers,

Debbie