Paul W. Frields wrote: > > We've thrown around the idea of a System Planning Guide, which would go > hand-in-hand with the Installation Guide, and talk about some of these > very basic UNIXish issues in a way that beginners could understand. It > helps, when going through the Installation Guide, to know how to make > the right choices when the installer gives you options. > > I hope that you will be able to stay on track with the account setup > documentation, but it also makes great sense for someone with fresh eyes > to help us tackle this System Planning Guide as ewll. > > I could really have used a system planning guide over the past few months. I have built two systems from scratch. I had only built one Linux system before, and that was years ago. (By coincidence, the second system used a hard drive that was transplanted from the corpse of another system that had gone belly-up. It was nine years old, poor thing.) My view of myself is I am fairly ignorant when it comes to the details of how Linux works, but pretty knowledgeable about computer systems in general. I am probably more confident of my ability to take on projects that are likely to become learning experiences and/or adventures than most people would be. Nevertheless, neither build was easy. The first one involved some cutting-edge software. The system, which uses an nVidia nForce4 chipset, was supposed to boot off a RAID 0 array. Oh my goodness! Going with the 64-bit FC5 distribution has only made things more interesting. :-) It was this experience, scrounging for documentation and anything that might give me a clue about what was going wrong and why, that convinced me that I should contribute to the docs project. The good news is I have learned a lot along the way. I have gotten a lot of experience with anaconda, heh. On the other hand, I still wish I had access to a nice document to confirm, one way or another, my theories about how much space to devote to various partitions. I ran across a nice discussion of how much you need in swap, and /boot takes care of itself. However, how much to give to /root or /home (given various scenarios for how you intend to use the system) still seems a bit of a black art to me. There are probably a bunch of other configuration choices that are like that. Without experience administering a system, it is hard for a novice to Linux or Fedora to know what choices to make, or even how important they are to get right (or not). The other thing my experience tells me is that a system planning guide might attempt to advise the novice on some other basic topics: - which release to use. Someone who wants the most stable system with fewest updates today should probably use FC4, not FC5. - what configurations are the easiest for a beginner. We all would like to say that FC is easy to install right out of the box. It certainly is for some configurations. However some features and drivers are more or less baked than others. For a novice I would recommend no RAID, 32-bit, no nVidia drivers. There's probably a lot more that can be said on this subject. - troubleshooting basics. How to get into linux rescue mode using your boot disk, and what you can do there. Some more common problems, their symptoms, and how to confirm if that's what has happened to you. Where to look for more help if you need it. Anyway, that's some grist for the mill! Cheers, Debbie -- fedora-docs-list@xxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-docs-list
