Re: [gentoo-project] Gentoo Handbooks moving to the wiki

[Jeff Horelick <jdhore@gentoo.org>]

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On 14 December 2014 at 09:22, Andrew Savchenko <bircoph@gentoo.org> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> On Sun, 14 Dec 2014 22:04:28 +0800 Ben de Groot wrote:
> > On 14 December 2014 at 21:59, Alexander Berntsen <bernalex@gentoo.org>
> wrote:
> > > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> > > Hash: SHA256
> > >
> > > On 14/12/14 14:57, Ben de Groot wrote:
> > >> Is https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Quick_install_guide not enough for
> > >> your needs?
> > > No.
> > >
> > > I like having a comprehensive book to lend friends and look at when
> > > helping friends install Gentoo. This is not comprehensive enough for a
> > > newbie.
> >
> > In such cases I would recommend a Live USB (or CD/DVD) that has a
> > graphical environment, so that the user can keep a modern web browser
> > next to a terminal window, to ease installation. In that case the wiki
> > is perfectly usable.
>
> No, this is not a solution, because on particular hardware live
> media (live usb/cd/dvd/whatever) may fail with video or gui support.
>
> I had such problem this year, when I had to install Gentoo from
> LiveCD without ability to use any other host for support (reading
> howtos, googling and so on). I used SystemRescueCD because of ample
> set of debug, admin and analysis tools I needed to configure
> system properly, but GUI was just a failure due to lack of nvidia
> drivers out of the box. Of course, I can easily fix such issues
> when fresh system is installed, but while it was being installed I
> had to use what is available from the live media. And elinks was a
> great help back there.
>
> So it will be really nice to keep handbook copies outside of wiki
> interface. Probably a reasonable compromise will be to keep
> handbooks at the wiki, but to use some script to generate simpler
> htmls for out of the wiki usage scope.
>
> Best regards,
> Andrew Savchenko
>


I feel like we do not need to optimize for this case really. I feel that
the odds of installing Gentoo where you have no GUI (via either the LiveDVD
or SystemRescueCD), no smartphone to use to look at the wiki, no tablet to
use to look at the wiki (I'm not sure about elsewhere, but here in the US,
you can get a brand-new Android tablet for $40 USD at a physical store
(less online) and in the UK you can find them under 50GBP), no spare
computers to use to look at the wiki are extremely unlikely.

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