Testing the Fedora 11 Installation Guide

[David Nalley]

On Sun, Apr 5, 2009 at 2:53 PM, Robert L Cochran <cochranb at speakeasy.net> wrote:
> This extremely welcome installation guide is wonderful! With relatively
> little time and effort, I was able to zero in on the requirements for
> doing a medialess install on an existing system that has the Grub
> bootloader, and it was a great experience. Too bad Anaconda crashed
> while creating the encrypted filesystem, but the intelligence of the bug
> reporting process for Bugzilla is amazing. The installer found an
> existing bug for this crash automagically, and added my traceback to the
> bug as a comment. This is quite heartening. It means a serious bug is
> more likely to get rapid attention because there is sufficient traceback
> detail posted to pinpoint the error.
>
> The Installation Guide section on Cobbler needs to be rewritten. First
> off, I can and did simply mount my entire *DVD.iso image to an http (web
> document) directory simply and quickly using the mount command. The
> Guide does not explain what Cobbler does, and why I might want to use
> it. It gives the impression that one must use Cobbler to do an http
> install. The guide should mention that for the http installation
> message, it is sufficient to mount the iso image to an web document
> directory and all will be well. That would seem to match the Red Hat
> Enterprise Linux documentation I've read, although the last time I had
> to review that was a long while ago.
>
> So, I didn't have to read the entire Guide through from page 1. I was
> able to locate the information I wanted quickly and use it quickly. That
> is one indication of a very promising, well-done document.
>


Bob:

Thanks for the compliments - most of the expansion of the Install
Guide (it went from ~70 pages to over 250)  is due to Ruediger
Landmann who writes the RHEL IG, and thanks to Red Hat's move to a
vanilla OPL license we are able to reuse some significant content, and
hopefully position the changes to the Fedora IG upstream for the RHEL6
IG.

We've been discussing (and silent on this list) this issue, and we are
going to try and get some corrections in to deal with this. The
Cobbler rewrite is the only thing really in question, adding the iso
loopback mounting and things like that shouldn't be a problem, but
larger overview of Cobbler might miss the April 14th deadline for
translation, but it should make it in.

Let me also start thanking everyone who has submitted comments thus
far. I think this is the only comment we haven't at least started
working on addressing. One of the reasons that I think this particular
guide is so important is due to the fact that Red Hat is hoping to
leverage what becomes the F11 Install Guide to become the RHEL 6
Install Guide. This means RH gets some better review and more input
and the IG writers get a bit more audience and use for their work.

Thanks,

David Nalley