On Monday 19 May 2003 16:19, Robin 'Roblimo' Miller wrote:
> Matt Miller wrote:
> >I disagree that most Linux technical documentation is poor. Not easy for
> >the casual read -- perhaps, but definitely not poor.
> >Personally, I rely heavily on technical documentation -- manpages,
> >Howtos, READMEs, etc.
>
> And your computer/Linux skills are how many orders of magnitude greater
> than the average person's? :)
After a while, particularly when working with other folks on your level, you
begin to think that everyone knows the same basics that you do. It's those
hard-earned basics that take the longest time to comprehend.
Everyone was a newbie once.
>From memory, the biggest hurdle for me starting out with Unix >10 years ago
was the fear of breaking the system entirely by typing the wrong thing. The
GUI has evolved quite a bit since then.. I'm still a relative "noob" when it
comes to administering a box via point-and-click (why bother, when you can
fix it in the fraction of the time from a shell prompt?)
I'll be the first to admit: we do make grandiose assumptions and take a lot
of things for granted. Moreover, we revel in our ignorance about many of the
new sysadmin-irrelevant things like GUIs that only get in our way. This
doesn't mean I don't try my best to keep up, though ;)
OpenSource changes drastically on an Internet timeline. Watching Microsoft
slip from power only supports my assertion that they're too large and clumsy
to react to the real OpenSource innovations that are currently underway.
Heck, I can barely keep up.
> That's the point, Matt. All those manpages, HOWTOs, READMEs, etc. are
> written for you, not for some poor schmuck who wants to get SuSe or
> Mandrake installed, figure out how to add plugins to Mozilla and make
> the "junk" email filters work, set margins and tabs in OpenOffice, crop
> a jpg image, and wonders why he or she needs to type in a password to
> install a program.
The larger problem is Document aging and obsolescense. Many of those old
HOWTOs and FAQs are *blatantly wrong* and full of inconsistencies between how
things once were and how they now truly are.
Often, it's far more valuable to me to rely on what I personally know to be
INCORRECT than to rely on bad documentation that only leads down a blind
alley. Then, and only then, can you glean the valuable bits of information
from those old HOWTOs/FAQs that only serve to mislead most newbies.
> Believe me, there are plenty of people out there who don't know how to
> add a program icon to a KDE panel, and don't have the slightest idea how
> to make mplayer work.
KDE's Help Center has some great online help documentation on its own.
help:/khelpcenter/faq/
Even without documentation, windows oriented folks seem to pick up on the KDE
metaphors almost transparently.
Most of the new distributions include a recent version of mplayer. Installing
the latest mplayer on a debian box is as simple as:
apt-get install mplayer-686 qt6codecs w32codecs
As for plugins, I have yet to see many include the mozilla-mplayer plugin, and
most of the other plugin "goodies" are often time consuming to grab and setup
manually. A chapter on tweaking a web browser for plugins would be a goldmine
for most users.
-- - Ian C. Blenke <icblenke@nks.net>(This message bound by the following: http://www.nks.net/email_disclaimer.html)
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