User Hostile Download Page

Charles Curley charlescurley at charlescurley.com
Fri Feb 15 13:52:17 UTC 2008


On Fri, Feb 15, 2008 at 11:19:50PM +1030, Tim wrote:
> On Fri, 2008-02-15 at 12:22 +0000, Pedro Freire wrote:

> 
> Before burning, and potentially wasting a disc, *I* check the downloaded
> ISO against the checksum.  After that check, I move onto the next step
> (burning the disc, or simply using that file on the hard drive).

Good advice. It would help if the sha1sums were readily available. To
download the DVD image for F8, I went to http://fedoraproject.org/,
and clicked on "Get Fedora" in the left hand column. That took me to
http://fedoraproject.org/get-fedora. Now, I may be getting blind in my
old age, but I see no reference to [check|sha1|md5|etc...]sums on that
page.

To get the sha1sums (and the rescue CD image) I grabbed the URL of the
DVD ISO, edited out the file name of the ISO file, and opened that URL
(http://limestone.uoregon.edu/ftp/fedora/linux/releases/8/Fedora/i386/iso/)
in another tab. I was then able to pull in the rest of the kit.

How about providing direct links to these files on the download page?

> 
> Before *you* download another four gigs, do that check, and see if what
> you've downloaded is fine.  If so, it's burning that you need to
> concentrate on, and you can use what you've already downloaded, getting
> it again is just going to be a waste.  If not, then it's downloading
> issues that you need to resolve.
> 
> Some reference material:
> http://docs.fedoraproject.org/readme-burning-isos/

Generally a useful page, except:

* It refers to F7, not F8.

* It refers to Windows tools and procedures. That's fine for folks
  using Windows. However, news flash: there are other operating
  systems in the world: Mac OS X, Free BSD, HP-UX, and one you may not
  have heard of called "Linux".

> http://docs.fedoraproject.org/install-guide/f8/

Again, as near as I can tell, no discussion of check sums or how to
get and use them.

And the main download page should have direct links to this sort of
stuff.

-- 

Charles Curley                  /"\    ASCII Ribbon Campaign
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