[Rule] Installation Report Template

[C David Rigby]

Hello all,

I have revised the Installation Report Template (article 40) and the
Instructions for the template (article 41). Before advancing to
publication, I would appreciate testing it (this probably means Marco
& Richard) Could you:

1) Please read the instructions to make sure they are lucid for
someone else to follow.
2) Please try them out! In other words, please download the zipped
file InstallTemplate.zip, decompress it, fill in a few things, etc.
3) Paste the result back into a blank article in the editor window of
the web site just as if you were writing an article. That way we can
make sure that it looks okay.

I did a quick install this morning using slinky-0.5.05. I noted a
couple things, but I'll go back and do an Install Report for the
process a bit more thoroughly as soon as I get a chance.

>From here:

Even though I never actually get anything finished until some time
during the week, I really do start it over the weekend. The weekend of
April 8 & 9 I'll have guests, though, so I won't get much done for
rule writing for a week or two.

Maybe all this writing for a living is making me too demanding.
However, there are a few grammatical and spelling errors in the
message screens of the slinky installer. Franz, I am happy to correct
things like that, if you are interested. If so, please let me know
what form you would like the results in. Patch files, the entire
script file with corrections, etc.

I'm thinking to start an article on actually performing a slinky
installation. The structure would be a start-to-finish description of
the installation process, since it has changed a bit in the last year
or so. This could serve to anchor a series of articles, with further
topics being things such as using yum to update the system, an updated
mini-KDE installation, turning a rule box into a firewall system, etc.

This seems more useful than an in-depth article on hardware
identification such as I sugggested last week. Indeed, I think I'd
probably start an installation article with a suggestion that the
tester just run slinky detect (which will provide most of what we want
to know anyway). If a tester has problems, then we can consider
digging deeper into the hardware on a case-by-case basis. I can return
to the hardware hacking topic later. Admittedly I find that subject
more interesting to write about than the installation process, which
is a lot like my day job!

Once we have a core group of articles, we might want to consider
translating into other languages, if people are interested. With help
(lots of it!) I could probably get French versions written. I suspect
that we can do Italian and German versions as well, if the native
speakers are interested in the activity.

Ciao
CDR