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Re: testing group -- please test the documentation (PART 2 of 2)



>       <sect>Decide Your Installation Type
>         <p>
>   Decide what type of machine you are creating. This will determine
>   disk space requirements and affect your partitioning scheme.
>   If you are not installing from CDs this also can make downloading
>   easier. E.g. X-section in archive is fairly large, but can be
>   skipped on many machines not used as personal workstations.

I would like to add this section; however, it's basically useless
unless I can provide actual total and /usr partition sizes when using
the base profile.  I.e., I don't want to ask them to plan but then not
provide the user with the data to plan with.

>   You should also decide how you are going to make various
>   parts of installation material available to your machine.

This is already discussed in 5.2 "Choosing Your Installation Media";
that probably wasn't there when you wrote your mods.

>   It can be helpful to collect a list of your PC setup: interrupts
>   IO ports, memory areas and DMA channels used by various cards.
>   This is always a good thin to have, but might be especially
>   handy when installing new OS.

Not really sure why this is necessary; you can get this info from w/in
Linux more than without it.

>   There should be somewhere a summary of where first stages (boot-floppies
>   and base) can reside and how they can be booted. Section 5 has the
>   info, but the summary should be written.

5.1 Introduction  (to the Chapter Methods for Installing Debian)

>   Expanded memory is older specification from the time when MS

You mean IBM?

>   thought that not many would need more than 640K of memory.
>   It is based on bank switching and is slow and incompatible
>   with 32 bit linear addressing Linux uses.
>  <aanote>
>   This is what I seem to remember from days long past, wonder if it is
>   true.

Well, I don't think we need to add this .. it already says don't use
expanded memory.

>   I had a problem in Debian 1.3 with Intel P150. Installation boot
>   hung at the end of kernel decompression unless I disabled cache.
>   Probably something to do with image size, since boot disks with
>   installed kernels booted normally. 

Woah, a lot of people have that problem!  Which cache settings did you
change?  Just the stuff mentioned in the document already?

>   Probably should explain some of the following:
>   - primary partitiona, extended partitions, logical partitions
>     MBR, partition table
>   - booting off 2nd etc. HD
>   - partition types & W98 (FAT16, FAT32, VFAT)

Ugh!  Probably should.  Stubbed out a new section, <sect>Other Gotchas in x86

Again, thanks for so many useful suggesstions.  Remember I only
mention here the changes you made that I took issue with.  The great
majority of your material was integrated.

--
.....Adam Di Carlo....adam@onShore.com.....<URL:http://www.onShore.com/>


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