TODO items for 5.3R

[Tom Rhodes]

On Tue, 17 Aug 2004 09:45:26 -0700
"Bruce A. Mah" <bmah at freebsd.org> wrote:

> On Tue, 2004-08-17 at 08:36, Tom Rhodes wrote:
> > On Wed, 18 Aug 2004 00:25:04 +0900 (JST)
> > Hiroki Sato <hrs at freebsd.org> wrote:
> 
> BTW, Hiroki, this is a great list.
> 
> > >  - Installation Notes
> > > 
> > >    Some parts are outdated.  doc/70485 has been committed, but more
> > >    work is needed to reflect the realities.  bmah@ pointed out
> > >    that we should have "quick-start" installation guide for
> > >    each platform instead of the current ones because they become
> > >    too long and difficult to be maintained.
> > 
> > Bruce Mah sunk my battle ship!
> 
> (For those who didn't have the dubious honor of growing up in the USA,
> this is a reference to a TV commercial for a "Battleship" board-game.)
> 
> Tom, I remember this commercial, but I can't believe that you're old
> enough to have actually seen it yourself.  :-)

Oh yea, I'm hella old y0, like 23 going on 24.  :(

But I did grow up in the 80s, I swear the commercial came out
in like 84-86.  Somewhere in there, and when they came out with
electronic talking battleship well, I had one of those but not
the original.  Perhaps I only seen one of the later commercials
for say, electronic talking battle ship or whatever.  But this
isn't really important, nor the fact that I remember Warrant's
"Cherry Pie" video on MTV.

> 
> > Heh, to be honest, Bruce and I were talking about this a LONG
> > time ago and now that I have a sparc64 machine, I'm actually
> > going to get started on it.  :)
> 
> That's great...all I have is a pile of i386 boxes.  To expand on this, I
> was thinking of something that was:
> 
> 1.  Short (two printed pages maximum).

Yes, there isn't much difference between the install proceedures.

Only difference may be how you boot.  For instance, on Sun machines
with OpenBoot you have several options:

Ok boot cdrom
Ok boot floppy
Ok boot net ...

> 
> 2.  Covering only the most common install cases (CD-ROM / DVD and, for
> platforms that support it, floppy).

As above.  :)

> 
> 3.  Just enough to get a user to the sysinstall screen.  The Handbook
> can take over from there.  One nagging thing at the back of my head was
> that I'm not sure how first-time users would get to the Handbook. 
> Obviously it's easy if they have net access.

This is something that has been on my mind for ages and I really
have no clue how to work around it.  :(

> 
> 4.  Mentioning platform-specific details (i.e. for i386, mention some
> BIOS settings such as boot order; for sparc64, list the commands one
> needs to type from the OFW console; for pc98, mention the 1.2MB
> floppies).  I was thinking we should probably just write separate
> documents for each platform rather than try to do the MI thing that the
> installation notes do right now...there are just too many
> platform-specific details to handle during an install.

That shouldn't be difficult.  I'm sure I even have our old
discussions in my inbox somewhere.  I *think* we discussed
something like:

Adding a boot section for each platform, or
Adding a boot section part which got the user to sysinstall and:
append the rest of the install chapter to it.

There was some more discussion but I'm too busy to dig it up and
will do so later on this evening.  :)

-- 
Tom Rhodes