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

[Rahul Sundaram]

On Mon, 2006-04-03 at 16:28 -0400, William Case wrote:
> 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.

Copying to fedora-docs list. Thanks for the feedback.

Rahul