A few suggestions for the Istallation Guide -- made by the truly dumb

William Case billlinux at rogers.com
Mon Apr 3 20:28:52 UTC 2006


Hi;

I am not ordinarily truly dumb; I have installed FC3 and FC4 several
times previously.  But when I installed FC5 about a week ago I wasted
about 4 hours because my brain refused to work, I had forgotten some
basics, and frustration took over.  Now I've been thinking that if I
could get my self into so much trouble what could happen with someone
truly new to Fedora. 

      * After down loading very slowly using BitTorrent (my cable
        company chokes BitTorrent downloads to about 33 KB/s), I went
        directly to Documentation ==> Installation Guide.  Suggestion:
        As one of the first Items in the Table of Contents of the
        Installation Guide replicate the Table of Contents (with links)
        from the Download ==> Download and Installation Instructions.
      * I had forgotten how to use SHA1SUM.  'man' that night seemed
        particularly obtuse.  There is a good example in the Download
        and Installation Guide but it took me an hour or so before I
        found it.  Suggestion: Installation Guide should have a clear
        link to the Download and Installation Guide or just copy the
        relevant paragraph with perhaps a more detailed explanation for
        how to use SHA1SUM with FC5 downloads.  In both, the use of
        SHA1SUM should be a separate ToC item.
      * I only burn .iso images to CD once every 6 to 8 months (for each
        new Fedora release).  I tried using the method shown in 4.1
        Preparing CD or DVD media, from the Installation Guide.  I tried
        every logical combination of the example used and I couldn't get
        it to work.  Probably some examples would have helped.  Is
        --device= /dev/hdc or CD-R/W or what? Is image-file.iso generic
        or is it FC5-i386-disc1.iso or what?  In any case, I couldn't
        make it work.  So I decided to try X-CD-Roast.
      * It took about another hour to find 4.3.2.3 Writing ISOs with
        X-CD-Roast from the Red Hat Linux Getting Started Guide --
        linked through the Download and Installation Instructions.  This
        ISO burning Howto is excellent.

As a separate suggestion, I have used DiskDruid to set up custom
partitions in the past, however, this time I wanted to do things
slightly different.  A fuller, more detailed Help button as opposed to
Release Notes during the DiskDruid part of the installation would have
been very useful.

In summary, all the info was there, it was just hard to find for a
newbie or someone suffering from a particularly bad brain cramp.

Regards Bill




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