On Sun, 14 Dec 2014 10:02:36 -0500 Jeff Horelick wrote:
> > > 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.

This case was really simple: use of any electronic devices aside
from PC in question was prohibited due to company's security
policies. In fact this is quite common case when we're talking
about business setups and not private workstations.

Also I'd like to note that smartphone is not solution for people
without perfect eyesight (e.g. me): reading too much text from small
screen is either painful (with small fonts) or inconvenient (with
large ones).

Please note I'm not saying "do not put handbooks in wiki" — this
is really a good idea to have all docs in one place; I'm talking
about some backup solution for such cases, like simple generated
htmls.

Best regards,
Andrew Savchenko