William Case wrote:
Hi all; Let me start by saying I am NOT in immediate need of using the rescuecd. But, I have been on other occasions. I have been unable to find a manual or guide on using rescuecd. I have found HOWTO's that give me the exact button pushes or command line instructions to use and managed to fix the problem at the time. I have not, however, found a text that explains what I am doing or why. I have a list of about 20 questions that could be answered and explained so that I would feel confident in using the rescuecd rather than feeling like I am making it up as I go along. There are two small issues that I would like to test here to see if there is agreement: 1) Could the word 'sysimage' for root's home file system be changed to something else more meaningful? To me, when I first had to use rescuecd, 'sysimage' was one extra bit of jargon I had to learn to translate when I was already in an agitated state because my system was dead.
This is used for consistency with the installer. To the installer, what's in that directory is the image of what will eventually be the installed system.
2) Could the prompt be set up to show me more information than sh-3.2#? It would make it easier for a new user to keep track of whether they were working in [rescuecd/sh-3.2]# file system or the [CASE/sh-3.2]# file system (CASE is the name of my host machine), if the prompt was more explicit.
This is the base, unconfigured prompt, as used in single-user mode, the second virtual terminal of the installer, and as a user when logging in with no home directory mounted. It indicates that no user configuration could be read from disk.
Remember when someone, particularly a new user, is in rescuecd for the first couple of times, they are usually in an emotional state characterized by frustration, fluster and fear that they have just blown their entire system. Adding a burden of unnecessary, incomprehensibility is just a disservice.
This isn't unnecessary incomprehensibility, it's failsafe simplicity.
Any ideas? Can these changes be considered a bug?
The existing behavior is simple, functioning as designed, widely documented, and familiar to a lot of people. There's nothing inherently wrong with rescue mode *for what it was designed to do*. The problem is that rescue mode wasn't designed for a new user. We really need a user-friendly recovery console, but it should be an application that works on top of the existing rescue mode that the experts already know, not a replacement for it.
-- Chris
