Re: what can a non-maintainer do...
At 03:04 PM 11/14/98 -0500, Adam Di Carlo wrote:
>Or stay right here -- maybe you
>could help me out with the Installation Manual? It needs so much
>work, I'm getting gray hairs just thinking about it.
I would be honored to help if I can. At the very least I can research
specific topics and write sections for review. Please point the way.
Let me relate some of my own experience and, perhaps, you can see what I
should document first.
I went most amuck in my own progress when I got to the end of the Install
doc, finished the install, and said "so what next". A few links to the
next docs would have been helpful. My biggest problem was that I couldn't
find the documents that are out there. I kept asking myself why there
wasn't a README-1ST document in the cd-rom top directory, that explained
how to get at the documentation. Fortunately, I knew about 'cat'. I found
'more' and eventually found 'less'. Other than having to reboot a few
times when my screen became totally garbled, I started to find my way around.
My biggest breakthrough came when I joined the debian-users and debian-doc
listserv and was able to ask a few questions. Then I reinstalled one time
too many and ended up with root not needing a password. I fixed that last
night and am off to setup ppp. I am trying to build a chat script but that
is painful going for many reasons.
Also, I am coming from Win95 and could not find any tool that let me mount
the Debian install cd-roms and look into the tar.gz documents from inside
Explorer. I think a document targeted to those making the Win95 to
GNU/Linux transition would have been helpful. Especially one that explains
how to find the documentation that exists. I am still looking for that one
HTML document, on the Install cd-rom, that opens the entire documentation
set to my Win95 Netscape browser. I am hopelessly addicted to several
Win95 products so I have a long ways to go. I somehow believe that merely
chronicling my transition from Win95 to GNU/Linux might be helpful. The
journey from the end of the Install doc to full productivity is arduous. I
have a thousand questions and about three answers so I AM making progress.
>BTW, do you speak any non-English languages?
No. I took French and Russian in high school but have not used them for
decades.
Speaking of languages brings up a quandary for me. I can use the Win95
tools pretty well but I simply don't want to invest another minute in
learning how to do SGML under Win95. Is it possible that I can publish
HTML documents for people to review and worry about getting them to SGML
once I have finished the transition to GNU/Linux. I suspect many potential
volunteers are in the same predicament as I am.
Thank you for your feedback and I look forward to finding ways to be helpful.
--
Copyright(c) 1998 Lyno Sullivan; this work is free and may be
copied, modified and distributed under the GNU Library General
Public License (LGPL) <http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/lgpl.html> and
it comes with absolutely NO WARRANTY; mailto:lls@freedomain.org
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