Suggestions for improving Fedora installation

[jim1944]

Based on my experience doing a hard drive installation of Fedora 7 on my AMD 450 Mhz machine, these would be my suggestions to improve the process:
1. If you are not customizing the software selection, skip the dependency check. On my machine the dependency check took over an hour and should have been unnecessary because I selected a default configuration: workstation with software development (no web server).
2. Ask user how much of the available space to use for the Fedora installation. The default is to take all of it. It shouldn't be. The remaining space should be available to other operating systems that may be using partitioning tools such as FDISK and older versions of Partition Magic.
3. Improve the default allocation of disk space. The default is /boot, swap and everything else (/). I think that things like /home and /tmp, which a user could cause to fill up, need to be in separate partitions to protect the integrity of the system.
4. Need to get rid of the 15 partition limit on a single hard drive. Actually its worse than that, the highest number allowed is 15 (e.g.; sda15). Given that one of the numbers is assigned to the extended partition and you may not have the full set of primary partitions, you may not be allowed to have 15. (OK, that's not really an installation issue but I encountered it during installation.)
5. Pick a default display resolution that will work on any display, Don't try to guess what the display will support. In my situation, the display resolution for the set up following the first boot up after installation was 1300 (something) X (I can't remember what) and it was impossible to see what I was selecting or clicking on. It was very difficult getting through those screens and finally logging on to set the display resolution to a correct (1024 X 768) setting that made viewing the desk top possible.

Any comment on these suggestions?

Thanks
Jim

[SlowJet]

www.debain.org

You are not correct on several of your statements.
1. It the same program as used for several different types of installs and updates.
It's a very complex program and there is a ton of conditions that have to be considered before installing.
A 450 is way to under powered to do a simple desktop and compiling would take days.

2. The default is for beginners - learn to use the Anaconda's disk druid partitioning screens and the dual booting of grub, disk selection, advanced boot options. (It's not very difficult after the initial confusion.)
The assumption that a newbie can delve into advanced issues without learning the basics is not ever going to workout for any combo of OS's and Computers.

3. With the disk druid you can create the old unix spread very easily. I have done it just for fun.
However, that was a idea from 15-20 years ago for slow small disks and sudo security. With modern fast big disks and SELinux they are not needed. (The default of / and (/boot and swap) only takes into account that there is not way to determine how much of each type of space will be needed, so each can grow on / as needed. Learn the disk druid tool and you can do it your way.

4. The ide drvs now have scsi code, scsi has always been limited to 15 luns per controller.

5. All the install can do is ask the monitor what it has and pick from a set that makes since.
It depends on your hardware and your video card. At least it started. :) And was easy to change.

So after all that, isn't amassing that a 10 year old door stop can run the most modern OS on the planet. :) yes? No?


SJ

[Dies]

I only have one suggestion.

Get some new hardware ! And I mean new, not just new to you.

Wow ! why would you even try getting Fedora on that ? must be a real dog...

I do agree with 1, 2 & 3 though, actually the other two are probably good suggestions but they don't affect most people, I mean really who needs 15 partitions ? and I would hate for them to go with a 800x600 resolution for everyone when the way it is now works well for most. ;)