Re: [Qemu-devel] No useful documentation.

[Daniel Carrera]

On Wed, 2006-05-07 at 22:25 +0100, Jamie Lokier wrote:
> Personally I found Qemu astonishingly easy to use, and simply not
> needing a lot of documentation to get an OS installed from CD into it.

I don't expect it needs a lot of documentation. It is a mistake to think
that "good" documentation equals "a lot" of documentation. Indeed, it's
often the opposite. Often a 1/2-page tutorial is all that's needed. But
if you take that information and scatter it around a 20-page manual, you
actually make it more difficult to figure out.

One of my favourite sayings: "If I had had more time I would have made
it shorter" :)

In any event, since you find it so easy to use, could you please tell me
how to use it?


> Is Windows harder to install in it than some random Linux distro?

I can't imagine why it should be. Not, I don't know how to install a
generic Linux distro either. Or for that matter, *any* OS at all. I have
a program called 'qemu' on my computer and I don't know what to do with
it. After reading the "documentation" I don't feel any closer to knowing
what to do than before reading it.

The only reason why now I have a fair idea of how it works is because
someone told me (on a different list). And it only took them 2
sentences. They said that the way qemu works is, you first create a
blank disk image and then boot the virtual machine from a CD ROM and
install normally.

There, that's just one sentence. That's an example of useful
documentation, and notice that it's not long. Indeed, it's quite short.
To make this complete, all I need now is a command to tell me how to
actually boot qemu and point it to both the CD DROM (e.g. the Ubuntu
install CD, or the Windows install CD) an my newly-created blank disk
image.

I should note another thing: Because the problem I'm pointing to is so
fundamental, you're much less likely to hear about it. You're not going
to hear about it much if the problem is that people can't even get
started. You're only going to hear about problems that occur after
someone gets started. I notice in your question that you assumed that I
knew how to install at least one OS with qemu; I don't. This is an
example of "just because nobody complains it doesn't mean that all
parachutes are perfect".

Cheers,
Daniel.
-- 
http://opendocumentfellowship.org
  "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the
  unreasonable man tries to adapt the world to himself.
  Therefore all progress depends on unreasonable men."
        -- George Bernard Shaw

signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part