Re: tech proposal to make manoj somewhat happy.
On Sun, Jul 26, 1998 at 06:36:05PM -0500, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> Petra> Not everyone uses less, or likes less. yes man itself is great
> Petra> for quick looks, however for the beginning person, man is
> Petra> confusing, and rather hard to use, however lynx is easy to
> Petra> use, and well documented.
>
> man is quite well documented too, and really is an historical
> part of the OS you are now using. Why is man hard to use? I say man
> man, and there I hasve it. It uses the pager I use, and which I have
> to learn anyway.
Man, afaik, is intended as a reference, not an explanation of how the
system works. It explains how each little piece works, but doesn't do
much to explain the whole, because this is not its purpose. Unix, by
its very nature uses many little tools to accomplish things - this is
what makes it so cool, but, one often cannot just understand how each
little bit works and know how the whole functions.
What I think some people mean to say (or at least what I read into
it), is that we need more comprehensive things in the style of
HOWTO's. These documents attempt to document particular systems, or
things many people want to accomplish.
I think the false dichotomy (err, is that actually a term?) that you
set up is that people are either experienced with unix and basically
know what is goign on, OR windoze people with no clue and no desire to
learn. I think there exists a category of user who is eager and
enthusiastic, but just wants to "get it running" before they have to
face the myriad of documentation that is necessary to do something
useful. From a psychological perspective, I would bet that people
feel *much* better about the system and tehmselves if they are able to
get something, even a minimalistic something actually running before
they have to start hitting the books. You need a base platform to hit
the books from, right?
Several years ago, after having heard about this neat OS from a
friend, I got my parents to give me a 386 with 4 megs of ram for
christmas. It was rather difficult to make linux work with it (I
needed the low mem bootdisk - even in those days, 386's were *old*),
but thanks to my tenacity and help on the IRC, I succeeded. I am now
employed in the computer field and making quite good money, all thanks
to Linux (well, and my desire to learn:-).
However, I needed a book to really get me through a lot of things
(hrmm actually, it was one of those online books that was also printed
- so I was able to read it with Mosaic:-).
I think a fair amount of people *want* to learn, but it is quite
disconcerting to have an OS where you don't really know where to begin
with it. It becomes sort of a chicken and the egg question.. there
are many difficulties, and to overcome them, you have to overcome
other problems involved with accessing documentation. It can be
frustrating even to those who *want to learn*.
So, I guess where I'm going with this, is that, in addition to an
informative installation process (maybe like the 'help' option on the
kernel config stuff - I think that is wonderful), maybe we should have
a few introductory docs that are presented to the user first off
(maybe if they select a novice install?).
This is just my take on things. Any errors, garbage, or logical
inconsistencies are because of the hot weather;-)
Ciao,
--
David Welton http://www.efn.org/~davidw
Debian GNU/Linux - www.debian.org
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