A friend of mine was installing Gentoo recently. He's an experienced hacker, and found it frustrating to use the Handbook. Only afterwards did he stumble upon the quick installation guide. Here's what he said: The Gentoo installation guide is impossible to print if you have any concern for your print quota, environment, ink costs, or common decency, while a concise, printable guide (which is all that most of us need) is buried in the documentation repository at http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-x86-quickinstall.xml. Please provide top-level links to both the concise guide and the full installation manual, so that people new to the distro can catch up quickly on the installation process. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. 2. 3.
Quick guide is only 3 clicks away from home page: Doc, Installation Related Resources, Gentoo Linux x86 Quick Install Guide.
When a new user tries to find instructions for how to install Gentoo, they don't go to "User docs", they go to "Gentoo Handbook", which is under the "Installation" header on the home page. Some installation resource that is more concise than the handbook needs to be linked under the Installation header.
(In reply to comment #2) > When a new user tries to find instructions for how to install Gentoo, they don't > go to "User docs", they go to "Gentoo Handbook", which is under the > "Installation" header on the home page. Some installation resource that is more > concise than the handbook needs to be linked under the Installation header. The idea is to make people go to the Gentoo Handbook. The Quick Install guide is *not* meant to be used as *the* installation resource, but exists so people who've been using Gentoo for quite sometime and they need not read the whole Handbook but can skim through the quick install guide instead.
That's the complaint. The handbook is not a one-size-fits-all. Its explanations are so lengthy that I was skipping entire sections, then missing necessary commands like "cp /etc/resolv.conf /mnt/gentoo/etc" because they were buried within pages of irrelevant (to me) information and wasting time tracking down the problem.
Also, as mentioned above, don't you see a problem with the situation where in order to install Gentoo, the average user has to either have another computer displaying the Handbook, or print the entire Handbook and waste an enormous amount of paper and ink in the process? I think that's a ridiculous situation to put new users into.
(In reply to comment #5) > Also, as mentioned above, don't you see a problem with the situation where in > order to install Gentoo, the average user has to either have another computer > displaying the Handbook, or print the entire Handbook and waste an enormous > amount of paper and ink in the process? I think that's a ridiculous situation to > put new users into. Huh? What another computer? You've got terminals for a nice reason, use them. And the install CDs come with a copy of the Handbook as well. If you have internet access at the time of install, you can view both the Quick Install guide as well as the absolute latest handbook, online.
