Brazilian Linux Users Want Better Documentation

brazilian brain writes "Did you know that users don't like the inclusion of payware bundled with our everyday's "official" Linux distributions? And that they need an User's Guide more than an Install Guide? Linux in Brazil ran a poll for 30 days, asking what users expected from the next editions of their preferred distributions, and discovered these facts - and many more." (Poll results have been translated to English; the rest of the site is in Portugese)

Comments

There is plenty of documentation out there.

[josepha48]

If they need it transulated maybe what needs to happen is someone needs to run the documentation thru Bablefish or something like that, and transulate all of it, or use some form of unicode document interface so that it can be read by them. Not being from Brazil, I can't say how good the transulations are or even if they exist.

I have installed several distributions: Redhat, Slackware, SuSE, debian, and TurboLinux. TurboLinux and debian were the more difficult for me. To install them you really aught to know what programs you want to install and know more about your Linux distribution, other wise you'll either go thru lots of dependance resolving or miss dependancies and have problems, if you ignore the dependancies.

I personally thought that the GUI for Redhat was not that difficult to use. Caldera is supposed to have a GUI, and SuSE was rather easy to me also.

I also think in time it will get easier to install. The documentation will get to be better, there will be more apps. I hope that this does not turn people who have used Linux for a while off thou.

The fact is that English seems to be the 'accepted default language'. Yes developers devlop all around the world, but both Linus and Alan do stuff in English. Yes Linus is Finnish, but he lives in the US now I believe. Thus most of the kernel is going to be in English. There is Geman docs out there and I am sure SuSE helps out there. There are other languages supported by some of the distributions, but I think that until there is a distribution that actually comes from Brazil they may end up suffering. Even the web site there was in English.

Re:Which docs do they use already?

[Rhys Dyfrgi]

For my part, if I'm trying to figure out a program, I'll go in this order:

1. man pages
2. info pages if neccessary
3. included documentation (/usr/doc etc.)
4. website for the program (found through Google)
5. links from the homepage
6. search on Google for other pages
7. usenet archives at Dejanews
8. ask on usenet. never gotten to this one.

If I'm trying to figure out how to do something, I go in a different order:

1. apropos
2. HOWTOs
3. websearch
4. usenet archives
5. ask on usenet. once again, haven't had to

I've been using Linux for around 4 months now, so a near-newbie as of yet. Once I started, though, I didn't go back (ever).

Anyone have any better suggestions?

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Re:don't be fooled

[Rhys Dyfrgi]

You can't compare WindowMaker to Gnome and KDE. They are completely different things. You could compare WM to Enlightenment or KWM, since those are the same product set, but Gnome and KDE are meant to be 'desktop environments', whereas WindowMaker is a window manager.
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An Idea...?

[scenic]

I was just sort of thinking about this and was wondering how many schools in English speaking countries have Portuguese departments or how many schools in portuguese speaking countries have english departments.

I went to Johns Hopkins, where they offered business and scientific french classes, and probably spanish as well (I don't remember, since I took French). I wonder if it would be possible to ask students taking those classes to translate the documentation and work on maintaining it. I mean, if you look at the sheer number of language students out there, there are sure to be enough that have the aptitude to translate technical documents, as well as the time to either volunteer to do it, or maybe do it for credit that they can get out of their departments.

For those of you still in college, this is something worth investigating. It would give them a great way to practice learning the language while helping the Linux community out.

Of course, this could just be a dumb idea, which I'm sure you'll let me know soon enough. :-)

Sujal

Not so easy...

[dcs]

Translation is hard and ungrateful work, and the people who need it doesn't know how to do it. That's very different from kernel hacking, where there is people who know how to do what is lacking, and even from documentation, where people write stuff based on their learning experiences (which can be based on irc/mailing lists).

Alas, that's not the whole problem. Each time a programmer uses a message string embedded in the program (in the C source), he makes it harder to translate the software. What are people supposed to do? Go through all source files and change each message by hand? And then what, have a "pt-BR" distribution, with different binaries?

If the OSS operating systems are ever going to get on par with the commercial operating systems, they need to standarize on message tables, so that changing language does not require recompiling anything, and supports even multiple languages at the same time (with the time-honored LANG environment variable).

don't we all; perhaps we should look at ourselves

[swonkdog]

so, they want documentation in portuguese. we all would like documentation in our native language (luckily mine is english). unfortunately, it is so hard to find people who want to document, and even more unfortunate is that the oss community at large has this tendancy to invite people in and then make the people who do not code feel inferior. i understand that code is what make the world go 'round and that is why i code. but, some people either cannot or do not want to code, but they *do* want to document. how many portuguese/english bilingual people do you think may have wanted to document but were driven off because they do not code. i am willing to bet quite a few. i hate to make this a soapbox on our treatment of people, but you have the reason right there, sometimes the truth hurts, but, there it is...
on the subject of needing a gui install. it is difficult to program a gui and the textbased installs work just fine.

Which docs do they use already?

[Stonehand]

It might have been interesting if they had also polled to see which sources of information are used (and in what order, if possible). At least on Usenet, there are an awful lot of questions that keep coming up, over and over and over, suggesting that Usenet appears to be a darn-near-first resource for some...

The sources that come to mind include, in no particular order:

* The LDP guides (esp. the _User's Guide_, since apparently stuff like that was wanted).
* The HOWTOs.
* man/info/... pages.
* Vendor-supplied documentation (installation manuals and so forth).
* Third-party books, on Linux or Unix in general.
* Other people (*nix-using friends), such as in LUGs.
* Web resources (hardware databases, and so forth)
* Usenet / Usenet archives (deja) / Usenet FAQ archives (rtfm.mit.edu)

For somebody who doesn't know any *nix-using people and doesn't have a background in CLI archives, nor in hunting down scraps of info w/ Google and company, a list could be rather important...

The opinion of a brazilian

[Karpe]

As a brazilian, I would like to share with you my opinions on the subject.

In Brazil, there was a boom in the media about Linux, specially because of a company called Conectiva wich sells a translated and adapted version of RedHat Linux. This company has grown a lot and fast. Now, you can buy Linux in any bookstore, software shop, etc.

This caused a *lot* of people to start using Linux, which is great, but this people don't have the habit of reading to much.

Conectiva supports 2 mailing lists, ldp-br, lie-br, which discuss and work on translation of HOW-TOs, man pages and on internationalization of software. I subscribe to them, and every now and then there is a guy asking how to configure his modem and such. Sometimes, I think if it really is worthy to translate documentation to these people. But then I wait, and don't think anymore about it, and keep working! :)

To conclude, there are a lot of documentation out there, and these people just don't like to read. They don't like to translate also. They expect that a big company will guide them by the hand.

As a friend of mine says, when someone switches from Windows to Linux, they are switching from a slingshot to a canon. And a canon can be very nasty if yu don't know how to handle it.