Issues with the Live CD requirement for separate /boot

[Adam Williamson]

On Tue, 2009-06-09 at 19:23 -0400, Scott Robbins wrote:
> Judging from the forums, the fact that the Live CD requires an ext3
> /boot and ext4 / is catching a lot of people by surprise. 
> 
> Is there any chance of some mention of it on the main page's download
> section?
> 
> While it may be in the release notes and/or FAQ, many people are simply
> distro hoppers who see there's a new version mentioned on slashdot or
> distrowatch, and will simply download the live CD, as it's smaller, and
> run into the issue.  Distro hoppers tend to just have one free partition
> for their newest experiment.  (Also, many, many folks have a progression
> of Windows=>Ubuntu=>Fedora, so they won't be expecting it, since the
> majority of distros these days will either go to the newer grub or still
> have ext3 as the default, especially the probably 50-100 that are based
> on Ubuntu.)
> 
> I've put a sticky up on the forum, but of course, by the time they get
> there, they've usually already been caught.  :)  
> 
> My own selfish concern is that I don't want to have to type a hundred
> times on the forum, "Please see the sticky in the installation section."

We can't really start documenting things like this on the download
pages. It's not the appropriate place, and it would just never end. We
rather need to do a better job of getting people to read the appropriate
places - the release notes and the common bugs pages - and 'we' in that
context includes those of us who help others in the forums :)

Ideally it would be best to direct people to the appropriate bit of the
release notes:

http://docs.fedoraproject.org/release-notes/f11/en-US/sect-Release_Notes-File_Systems.html

rather than a forum sticky, but sadly that note is a bit...lacking :\.
It's very short and doesn't describe things very well. But in an ideal
world, that's how it should work. The more you direct people to release
notes, the more it becomes a habit to read them.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net