CHECKSUM is not easily accessible on Fedora Download Page

[Tim]

On Fri, 2011-01-21 at 13:03 -0500, Máirín Duffy wrote:
> The biggest challenge in not losing folks before they even give Fedora
> a chance is making it easy when they have to figure out how to get the
> ISO to optical media or to USB (the latter which can be really
> challenging.) Weighing the pros and the cons here, I'd rather have
> someone running Fedora and be less prone to viruses and security
> break-ins rather than lose them altogether when they give up trying to
> learn ISOs, liveusb creation, checksum checking, and GPG all in one
> go.

If you encourage the "just click and don't think mentality," you
perpetuate much that's wrong with that other OS.  The trick is to
explain it succinctly (i.e. *accurately*, and quickly).

e.g. What's an ISO disc image file, and what do I do with it?  It's an
compilation of files, the files contained inside it will be placed on a
disc.  The ISO file will not be simply copied to the disc, as a file.
You will use CD/DVD burning software that takes an ISO file, and uses it
to create a disc.  This disc will contain hundreds of files, and will be
self-bootable.  The install will start when you boot from this disc.

It really needs to be a short paragraph.  Exactly how to do it, is
another step.  If they can understand the explanation, it's much more
likely that they'll be able to successfully do it.

They don't have to learn it all in one go.  They need brief explanations
of what the options are, enough so that they can understand at least one
of them.  So they can pick which one to use.

You can't cater for the completely clueless.  If they don't know what
"booting" is, they're going to have to learn that first.  And, to be
blunt, if they don't know that is, I don't think they know enough about
computing to change OSs, nor install a new one.  That's why new
computers come with pre-installed OSs, for those who just want to buy a
box.

I don't think USB is going to get easy until all the various OSs make it
easy to right-click a USB drive and "make this drive bootable," and you
put files onto the drive that will be auto-booted.  i.e. The first file,
the one it boots, would have a common file name.

The idea of a bootblock that handles that is better, but that requires
bootblock writing features that aren't available to ordinary users, like
dragging one or two files to a disc are.  You'd really need a "download
a Fedora installer for Windows" and another for Mac, that'd
intelligently find the USB drive the user plugs in when prompted, so it
only writes to the right drive, then puts everything on it.

-- 
[tim at localhost ~]$ uname -r
2.6.27.25-78.2.56.fc9.i686

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