Installation Guide TODO list

[Stuart Ellis]

On Tue, 25 Jan 2005 11:06:26 +0000 (GMT), "Mayank Sharma"
<geekybodhi at yahoo.co.in> said:
> --- Stuart Ellis <s.ellis at fastmail.co.uk> wrote: 
>
> KNOWN ISSUES
> 
> - Need to find a simpler way of formatting a USB
> device with the Fedora boot image ("Beginning the
> Installation").
>
> We could ask the fedora-devel for a standard method if
> it exists. 

That's one possible source of information (a longer comment is on my
other mail).  The issue is that the command-line specified is likely to
be wrong because it is not guaranteed that your USB device will be
/dev/sda1.  So the ideal would be to specify a utility where the user
can select from the available devices on their system.

I'm happy to drop the step-by-step instructions if we can't feasibly
give specific instructions that will be true for most cases.

> Meanwhile, let's write the procedure as per
> FC3. 

OK.  Again, the thing that we have account for in our text is that the
dev nodes and mount directories are not guaranteed.

> We could start a maintainence file (!) that lists
> things (such as this) which need to checked with every
> release of FC. This would make maintaining the doc
> easier.
> 

I think that this is a great idea.

> - "Network Configuration" section does not document
> wireless.
> 
> I have Linksys WMP11v4 cards. They get no special
> treatment from Ananconda in FC2 and FC3. We could
> check with the devel guys what chipsets they support
> (if any).

This is where I apologise for having no document specification to point
to.  These points probably haven't ever been written down:

a) A hard requirement: our text has to apply to multiple architectures
(32-bit PC, 64-bit and PPC), so architecture-specific references have to
minimised.  As an example - the text says "firmware, or BIOS", because
BIOS is actually just the name of the 32-bit PC firmware.

So we can't reference specific manufacturers and models of hardware in
the main text.

b) Objective: The IG text should document how to use anaconda to achieve
things, rather than just stating what anaconda does.

Hence the question - what happens if one of the interfaces is wireless ?
 Does the user have to add more settings, or can they verify that the
wireless was configured correctly because they will be able to see it
listed as an available interface ?  Is there anything else that the user
will need to do, or be aware of, in order for the wireless to work (in
FC3 you probably have to enable NetworkManager) ?

I don't know the answers to these questions...

c) Objective: the text must be useful without offering detailed
information which is not likely to apply to individual readers. 
Unecessary information makes the information that is relevent to the
specific user harder to focus on.

The best way I could think of to meet both b) and c) is to keep
detailed, technical or highly information out of the main text.  This is
the logic behind putting "Network Logins" as an appendix, rather than
including a description of the settings in the "System User" section.

> 
> - Kickstart option in Network Boot Services does not
> appear to work ("Configuring Network Installation
> Servers").
> 
> Haven't used kickstart ever. 

Don't worry about it too much, then.  It can be fixed by whoever writes
the Kickstart appendix, since they will have a working Kickstart setup
that they can test against.

> ---
> 
> My TODO (in order of the probability of them getting
> done :)
> 

Whatever you can do is helpful.
--

Stuart Ellis
s.ellis at fastmail.co.uk