Date: Tue, 04 Aug 1998 17:24:31 -0700 From: Mike Smith <mike@smith.net.au> To: Chris Hill <jchill@dgsys.com> Cc: freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Install *actually* friendly Message-ID: <199808050024.RAA00658@dingo.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 04 Aug 1998 18:21:52 EDT." <v03007800b1ed30dc8847@[204.97.64.155]>
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Thanks for your comments Chris. > Gripes: > > 1. The instructions-docs-readmes pertaining to the installation need to be > more explicit on the fact that the boot floppy's little kernel has enough > smarts to handle an ftp installation all by itself. As they are, the docs > seem to have an underlying presumption that the user is installing on an > existing PC which is already running WinDOS. So much so, that I was under > the impression that one needed some sort of pre-existing internet > connectivity in order to install via ftp. (This was a virgin hard drive.) Writing documentation is very hard, especially if you've just spent lots of time writing the code in question - what seems obvious to the author is going to give newcomers problems. We count on feedback like yours, preferably before releases, to help with this. Having said that, the FAQ in section 2.1 tries to make the point above clear, as does the opening paragraph in section 2 of the handbook, and section 1.5 in the installation help document (INSTALL.TXT, also on the sysinstall menu). I'm not sure where else it could be usefully mentioned. > 2. Let's say some poor schmuck is trying to do an installation from > floppies. If one of the diskettes is bad, why does the installer claim to > have encountered a "Write failure on transfer!" when in fact it was a READ > error due to the bad floppy? There's no way to determine whether the error was a read or a write error, unfortunately. The most common cause of this is people running out of space on their partitions, so "write" was chosen to highlight this. > 3. The schmuck in question can always flip over to the other virtual console > and look at the debugging info, but only if he knows to press alt-Fx. The > only place I saw this mentioned was in the on-screen help for the *ftp* > installation, but no mention was made anywhere else. The virtual console is > a truly great feature, but it needs to be documented. This is documented under "Special Features" in the (succinct) usage document, available from the initial sysinstall mennu. > 4. Since FreeBSD runs on PC hardware, I would have thought the default > configuration would be set up to deal with all the "normal" devices one > might expect to find on a PC. Although I don't anticipate using the floppy > drive much if at all, still, it *is* there. I would have liked not to have > had to manually edit my /etc/fstab just to be able to use my floppy drive. You don't have to. # mount /dev/fd0a /mnt works just fine. -- \\ Sometimes you're ahead, \\ Mike Smith \\ sometimes you're behind. \\ mike@smith.net.au \\ The race is long, and in the \\ msmith@freebsd.org \\ end it's only with yourself. \\ msmith@cdrom.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message
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