Fedora Present and Future: a Fedora.next 2014 Update (Part I, “Why?”)

[Tim]

Allegedly, on or about 21 March 2014, Powell, Michael sent:
> The system name or hostname is important to networking; so, I can see
> why it's under networking, but I believe your frustration is more
> related to the lack of guidance and quality than anything else.

Well, actually, for a lot of people, the system name is simply what they
want to call the computer.  The computer may not even be on a network,
at all.  There's certainly cause for having a process of naming the
computer.

For LANs, the hostname may not actually be set on the computer.  A DHCP
server may dole out IPs and hostnames, or simply dole out hostnames and
a DNS lookup discovers what name is given to that IP.  In that scenario
there's some logic to using the network configuration to fill in the
name.  Though there's still the reverse case, where I want to name a
computer, and let the rest of the network find out what my name is, from
me (well, /this/ computer, not actually me, personally).

> The old installer did a much better job of 'guiding' the user through
> a set path of installation which achieved greater visibility and made
> it hard to skip or miss options. Of course, the negative side was the
> user could have an overwhelming feeling due to the tremendous amount
> of time it took to go through everything. The new installer sacrifices
> visibility and guidance for a more free process that sometimes has a
> very cookie-cutter or blank feeling to every screen, but it
> drastically reduces the time spent in installation since the user can
> bounce around wherever they want. 

I found the old installer (e.g Fedora 9 vintage) to be quite basic in
what you had to play with.  Sure there were options you could fiddle
with.  But you could simply opt for one of about four installation types
(general desktop, minimal install, etc.).  You could opt for fiddling
with partitions, or let it erase and install.  I didn't find it hard to
manually set up partitions.  The set and forget approach worked fairly
well to get the install run.  And the post-install routine was fairly
simple, too (basic networking, set the clock, etc.).

-- 
[tim at localhost ~]$ uname -rsvp
Linux 3.9.10-100.fc17.x86_64 #1 SMP Sun Jul 14 01:31:27 UTC 2013 x86_64

All mail to my mailbox is automatically deleted, there is no point
trying to privately email me, I will only read messages posted to the
public lists.

George Orwell's '1984' was supposed to be a warning against tyranny, not
a set of instructions for supposedly democratic governments.