How's the documentation? I was looking through it, and it seems pretty good, but the only time you can tell if the documentation is good is when you really need it.
Also, any gotchas that you came across that the docs didn't seem to cover?
it's not that bad. kind of sparse and poorly organized but better than some i've seen. sorcerer does a few peculiar things that make it more or less necessary to read the documentation carefully. eg, when you use the regular menuconfig to turn options on and off in the kernel, there are a few things that you have to be careful to not touch because sorcerer requires them. the biggest problem with the documentation as far as being suitable for newbies is that since sorcerer's installer still requires you to do other things like configure and compile your own kernel, the documentation for that stuff isn't included. they expect that you're reasonably comfortable compiling a kernel already.
what got me was that it uses devfs, which i'm relatively unfamiliar with. this means that you have things like /devices/discs/disc0/part1 instead of /dev/hda1. so when sorcerer dropped me into /etc/lilo.conf to make any changes i needed i saw it pointing to the devfs stuff for the boot location, thought it was wrong and changed it to /dev/hda (what i'm used to seeing in lilo.conf). once i figured out that i'd screwed that up it was a pretty simple matter to boot from a rescue disk, change it back and rerun lilo. if i'd actually read the documentation more carefully the whole install would have gone perfectly smooth.
so i think some more prominent mention of the whole devfs thing should probably be in the docs.
Mark Boudreau - 2002-03-15 11:59:11
How's the documentation? I was looking through it, and it seems pretty good, but the only time you can tell if the documentation is good is when you really need it. Also, any gotchas that you came across that the docs didn't seem to cover?anders pearson - Fri 15 Mar 2002 12:00:11
it's not that bad. kind of sparse and poorly organized but better than some i've seen. sorcerer does a few peculiar things that make it more or less necessary to read the documentation carefully. eg, when you use the regular menuconfig to turn options on and off in the kernel, there are a few things that you have to be careful to not touch because sorcerer requires them. the biggest problem with the documentation as far as being suitable for newbies is that since sorcerer's installer still requires you to do other things like configure and compile your own kernel, the documentation for that stuff isn't included. they expect that you're reasonably comfortable compiling a kernel already. what got me was that it uses devfs, which i'm relatively unfamiliar with. this means that you have things like /devices/discs/disc0/part1 instead of /dev/hda1. so when sorcerer dropped me into /etc/lilo.conf to make any changes i needed i saw it pointing to the devfs stuff for the boot location, thought it was wrong and changed it to /dev/hda (what i'm used to seeing in lilo.conf). once i figured out that i'd screwed that up it was a pretty simple matter to boot from a rescue disk, change it back and rerun lilo. if i'd actually read the documentation more carefully the whole install would have gone perfectly smooth. so i think some more prominent mention of the whole devfs thing should probably be in the docs.