I'm thinking that any Windows users thinking of installing Fedora are more adept at burning ISO's that you give them credit for. That said, while I wouldn't suggest any material changes to what you've posted for Windows, what about novice Linux users, who might be working from a Linux distro, possibly even a live CD? I.e., how about instructions for how to burn ISO's in Linux, especially for situations where the CDROM is not automounted, and users may not have menu access to a burner utility. I suppose I qualify as a semi-literate Linux user, and frankly I was taken by surprise that FC5 no longer automounts removable media. The release notes say something about "gnome-mount" but it is Greek to me (as I use TWM or XFCE, not Gnome). Fortunately, I speak Geek, and quickly scoped out what FC5 was showing in /dev, and mounted the cdrom from the command line, and proceeded to burn iso's with cdrecord. If we are going to cater to CLI-challenged Windows users, we probably should do the same for CLI-challenged Linux users, and step them through the process of burning ISO's from the command line, if need be. Otherwise, the document is very well written for its intended audience. I'm just suggesting broadening the "non-technical" audience to include Linux users who might fall into that category. Basil Copeland On 4/1/06, Rahul Sundaram <sundaram(a)fedoraproject.org&gt; wrote:

Rahul Sundaram wrote: I would have thought that one could say everything about burnings ISOs in a few sentences; it hardly seems to me to warrant a separate document. My view would be that a document on how _not_ to burn ISOs, ie how to install Fedora without using CDs (or DVDs) would be much more useful. I know there is a section in the Installation Guide on Alternative Installation Methods, but it strikes me as rather esoteric - eg I would prefer to read the actual commands one has to give if using PXEboot, for example. I've had a surprising amount of trouble with the FC-5 CDs - quite possibly due to my CD-burning hardware - and this has led me to wonder if too much emphasis is not put on CDs as installation medium. If you have only one machine, is it really worth burning a CD? Many people have huge disks nowadays, so if you have to download the ISOs, isn't it just as simple (and more reliable, in my case at least) to install from hard disk? And if you have lots of machines, isn't a USB drive as easy to use today as CDs? Just a few, slightly OT, thoughts. PS I'm very happy with FC-5, thanks - it does seem to me that each FC distribution is slightly better, although I would worry that they are also getting more complicated. I'm also very impressed with the effort being put into documentation. -- Timothy Murphy e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366 s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland

On Sun, 2006-04-02 at 12:53 +0100, Timothy Murphy wrote: Bear in mind that you need to boot the machine before you can select an installation source (or "method" as Anaconda calls them). Virtual machines can use image files as boot devices, but the supported boot options for a physical machine are PXE, disc, and bootable USB device. The IG covers all of the options and combinations, which makes it hard to present a linear set of instructions, although somebody is looking at revising these parts of the IG to make it simpler. Plenty of people clearly do want a simple set of steps, and various popular third-party sites offer installation tutorials. I'd be happy to accept help on doing something within Fedora to address this need. I'd personally recommend that people who have multiple machines and a bit of know-how setup a local mirror, and boot from PXE or a boot-only CD. We have a tutorial for mirrors, and the IG has an admonition that gently prods people toward it: http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/mirror/ As you say, drives are now so big that you can easily store all of Fedora Core on a regular machine and use it as an installation and yum source. Indeed, every machine on your network if you like. USB boot is relatively new, and isn't yet as standard and reliable as CD drives, which are on pretty much every machine made in the last half-decade (apart from ultraportables). -- Stuart Ellis stuart(a)elsn.org Fedora Documentation Project: http://fedora.redhat.com/projects/docs/ GPG key ID: 7098ABEA GPG key fingerprint: 68B0 E291 FB19 C845 E60E 9569 292E E365 7098 ABEA

On Sun, Apr 02, 2006 at 04:56:00PM +0100, Stuart Ellis wrote: Sorry to chime in late on this thread -- I think this is a very important document and I'd like to link it up with the Draft System Planning Guide; http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Docs/Drafts/SystemPlanningGuide As somehow who supports Linux professionally, I can not tell you how many people I have had to talk to about the proper way to burn an image. This is something completely non-obvious to most users and a massive cause of frustration -- even though we'd like to think it's trivial. Sam -- Sam Folk-Williams, RHCE Red Hat Global Support Services Phone: 919/754-4558 GPG ID: 1B0D46BA