Re: How can the OS autodetect that a user is a newbie and offer help?
On Tue, Oct 17, 2006 at 01:02:45PM +0000, Jason Spiro wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I believe that since command-line Linux is hard to learn, Debian should
> offer handholding. (This would benefit both Debian users who are new to
> the command line and How can the OS autodetect that a user is a newbie
> and offer help?
Hmm, I don't think it's "hard to learn", it's just "hard to switch" when
you say a "normal user" to switch his OS now.
> For example, when a person types newbie commands like "help" or "kde"
> (which is bound to something already) or the DOS commands "del" or "ren"
> (which are not), we should point them to more help. (In case anyone here
> has ever watched a real clueless newbie struggle: What are other
> commands that 100% clueless newbies often type?)
This is a good idea, we put little shell scripts somewhere and add it to
the PATH variable for all members of the group "newbies", something like
that at least. Then we could also tell them which manpages to read and
point them to some good websites or wikis.
> What would be a good help text to offer when a user types a command that
> indicates he/she is a newbie? Also, what package should I file a
> wishlist against to request that such help be added?
We could start together a project which does this shell scripts, I think
it's not really a lot of work. Don't file a bug, first we can do a
"linuxnewbie" program and someone (maybe myself) will build a debian
package one day.
For me there's only one point:
We have to make sure that advanced users DO NOT get this bothering
messages.
Regards
--
.''`. Mario Iseli <admin@marioiseli.com>
: :' : proud user of Debian unstable
`. `'`
`- Debian - when you have better things to do than fixing a system
Reply to: