Re: [gentoo-dev] Installation Instructions improvements

[Pierre-Henri Jondot]

On Sun, 20 Oct 2002 02:36:00 +0200
Andreas Karafyllis <ak_personal@××××××××××.de> wrote:

> Hello everyone!
>
> I installed before 2 days the 1.4-rc1 version (from the UT2003 CD) using
> an ADSL connection and I would like to suggest some improvements and
> corrections to the installation instructions. Before that, I would like to
> say THANK YOU for this great distribution. Keep the good job. After
> testing the last years a lot of different dists, I think that this time I
> found what I was looking for.
>
> I describe my suggestions under the title of the corresponding sections.
>
> 2.Booting
> ----------
> I use a german keyboard (I am a Greek living in Germany :-)) and I was not
>
> prompted to choose a keyboard layout after I logged in as described in
> this section. This can be a VERY difficult situation for some people and
> certainly a very bad first impression.
>

Agreed. The small iso for gentoo 1.1a took care of this... This has been
forgotten in 1.4_rc1 isos... Hope new isos (and especially with better
hardware support) will come soon.

> 5. Configure installation networking
> ----------------------------------------
> The instructions about the ADSL subscribers are a little bit confusing.
> There is only a note which refers to another document. I think that this
> reference make thinks complicated and should be removed. At this point you
> have to do only "adsl-setup" and then "adsl-start" (net-setup eth0 was not
> needed in my case). Therefore I suggest to remove this note and add a
> subsection for the ADSL configuration using the following listing:
> # adsl-setup
> # adsl-start
>
Done... 

> 14. Final steps: kernel and system logger
> ----------------------------------------------
> Many things here.
> a) I decided initially to use the gentoo-sources. But when I was
> configuring the kernel using "make menuconfig" I could not locate the XFS
> module (I choosed the XFS filesystem for my root partition in the previous
> steps). You should have a big warning here in which sources is available
> the XFS. Finally I used the XFS sources of course.

You're right... The build document could be made clearer there... 

> b) The notes and warnings must be BEFORE the code listings. Many people
> (like me ;-)) are not so patient and execute the listsings before reading
> all the paragraph

Hmm... Well, if it can serve as a lesson, learning new users to think, and
read the docs, before messing things up, it is not such a bad thing...

> c) I realized later (after booting)  that my adsl connection was not
> working. I suspected that probably I forgot something when I was compiling
> the kernel. I booted with CD again, brought up the ADSL connection and
> made an lsmod to see which modules are loaded. I realized that the problem
> was that when compiling the kernel I did not included the "PPP support for
> async ports" (ppp_async) and "PPP support for sync tty ports"
> (ppp_synctty). Both are needed (and the pppoe of course)
>
Not sure about the second (synctty) because it is listed as (unused) on my
system, but quite confident pppoe is not needed at all... But a note has
been added to the build instruction to that effect...

(N.B. : PPP support for async ports is needed for the async mode of
rp-pppoe, which is the default, PPP support for sync tty ports is needed for
the sync mode of rp-pppoe (to be enabled by editing /etc/ppp/pppoe.conf) as
well as another one. As for pppoe, it could only be used when rp-pppoe is
built with kernel mode pppoe support, which is not currently done by the
rp-pppoe ebuild.)

(I was perhaps wrong though about the compression algorithms in the build
documentation... Sometimes they are needed it seems, sometimes they aren't.)

-- 
Pierre-Henri Jondot <Pierre-Henri.Jondot@×××××××.fr>
Page perso : http://perso.wanadoo.fr/phj