Re: English skolelinux users mailing list etc
Hi,
On Mon, 09 Aug 2004, Ralf Gesel|ensetter wrote:
> seems like everybody sticked to your AMD vs. Intel question - hence belated
> comments on the topic :)
my fault for mixing questions together, sorry!
> You are right that there is no specific users list in English - AFAIK that is.
> We had similar discussions on German users list - which was created as users
> list from the very beginning.
I know most of the users are currently in Norway but a mailing list for
direct help in English would appeal to English speaking countries as well
as other people with English as a second language.
> Still, mere front end users keep complaining about too much technical
> contents...
The people I had in mind are beginning administrators as opposed to
beginner users. If a beginning administrator has difficulty with mailing
lists, she/he has bigger problems. Perhaps what I'm talking about is
better described as a Skolelinux Administrators Group (The SKAG!). Most of
the users would probably be better off on the forums for the software in
question (eg OpenOffice).
> If the community of natively English speaking users increases, having a
> separate users list could be a good thing. On the other hand there are two
> contradicting issues:
>
> * splitting up this list could increase the loss by friction
If it's necessary that the developers see the users problems, they
could join both and continue to discuss development issues on debian-edu
thereby shielding the newbie users from the finer points of ldif etc. For
a beginning admin it will be very difficult to interrupt such a discussion
to ask something like `when I boot a thin client, I see the "starting
syslogd" message and then the screen goes blank'.
> * real front end users are not too familiar with mailing lists - a web forum
> possible rather matches their needs
I guess it's a preference thing but I don't much like web forums. In my
experience they're rather clumsy to search and use.
For example I've been dealing with issues like getting etherboot/pxe
working, "network" booting options which don't seem to do anything much,
old monitors which need special host configs in ltsp etc. These would
seem out of place on the developer list as they don't really reflect
development issues.
If a mailing list gets up and going, a good FAQ will become convenient to
write for it based on the answers in the archive.
> Are you referring to the suggested users list, here? Or would you install a
> web forum for this task?
No, I guess this is a real user forum (be it mailing list, web forum or
whatever). However, I hadn't really thought much into this. I'm not sure
if it's useful or if, as I said, the users would be better off in the
OpenOffice/KDE/etc forums.
> Well, your questions were examples, but alas distracted people from the
> original subject. However, this indicates that people on this list are
> the most competent to answer users' problems...
Sorry about that, though it was very nice to get the answers. Thanks to
all concerned. I agree of course that this group are well qualified to
answer questions. However it seems to me that the topic of the group would
be best described as development rather than user.
For my part I will happily join immediately and do my best to answer
questions (though my experience of Skolelinux is currently short, I've been
a few years on Debian). If some administration is required I guess I can
help there too. I've never setup a public mailing list though.
Gavin
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