Having gone from DOS to OS/2 to Win95,8 and finally Debian, I must say the hands down best documentation was 4DOS. Instantly available, context sensitive, combining the best of man pages, HOWTO tutorials, and a hypertext environment, it kicked butt and took names.
The man page for LILO, for instance, mentions that the lilo.conf option "linear" substitutes linear HD addressing for cylinder/sector/head addressing, but does not mention why this option is present. Neither does the mini-HOWTO for LILO, for that matter.
End-user documentation may be the last frontier in Linux. Man is convenient, but often incomplete or not enough of a tutorial (and, as a quick reference, should in and of itself perhaps not be a tutorial). If info/pinfo is to be useful, it could and should take these two needs into account.
In the meantime, see you on debian-user@lists.debian.org.:)
This is very true. My father managed an international corporation's transmission remanufacturing plant for years. He went from selling the products to managing the fix-it plant. He restores old cars, collects blueprints of WWII airplanes, and lectures me knowledgably on my pickup's loads, the right tires and how to inflate them so I am not knocked unconscious when I'm driving an empty truck down a dirt road. He located a new differential gearing for the truck when it was used to pull a heavy trailer to make the ratio steeper, increasing power without swapping the engine; knows a lot, as I said. Not many people know how to locate an alternate differential.
But he despises computers and dislikes engineers. If you mail him a letter, he can keep it forever unless the house burns down (frequently called a "disaster" and "Act of God"). If you email him, he'll print it out or make a paper notation, because, when a computer crashes, it's called "cumulutively inevitable" and a "[important, wishlist] bug." (He owns a PowerMac, BTW.)
Engineers at the plant seemed to refuse to see problems as a part of a continuum from design, through production, marketing, use, maintainence, and discard. My father's true job, really, was not so much managing the plant as convincing the engineers that the customer had a legitimate gripe that, say, though efficient, sticking the compression kill switch next to the windshield wiper control was NOT optimal.
Most of the software he sees on his computer was designed by engineers thinking like the ones he knew. Not Their Problem. The Product Is Right; the Goal the Customer Has is Wrong. No One Should Want to Do That. Linux needs a near error-free install and desktop for the poeple who, God help them, don't WANT to know how to make their box jump through hoops. Let the would-be wizards comment out the dotfile lines themselves! Or like Lynx, choose your skill level, during the install. Wizards and users (I'm in the latter category, let me emphasize) know how to delete files. We can trade delete scripts on the Net to rid our boxes of stuff that Debian or RH should have known better than to include.:)
Slashdot Mirror
The man page for LILO, for instance, mentions that the lilo.conf option "linear" substitutes linear HD addressing for cylinder/sector/head addressing, but does not mention why this option is present. Neither does the mini-HOWTO for LILO, for that matter.
End-user documentation may be the last frontier in Linux. Man is convenient, but often incomplete or not enough of a tutorial (and, as a quick reference, should in and of itself perhaps not be a tutorial). If info/pinfo is to be useful, it could and should take these two needs into account.
In the meantime, see you on debian-user@lists.debian.org. :)
But he despises computers and dislikes engineers. If you mail him a letter, he can keep it forever unless the house burns down (frequently called a "disaster" and "Act of God"). If you email him, he'll print it out or make a paper notation, because, when a computer crashes, it's called "cumulutively inevitable" and a "[important, wishlist] bug." (He owns a PowerMac, BTW.)
Engineers at the plant seemed to refuse to see problems as a part of a continuum from design, through production, marketing, use, maintainence, and discard. My father's true job, really, was not so much managing the plant as convincing the engineers that the customer had a legitimate gripe that, say, though efficient, sticking the compression kill switch next to the windshield wiper control was NOT optimal.
Most of the software he sees on his computer was designed by engineers thinking like the ones he knew. Not Their Problem. The Product Is Right; the Goal the Customer Has is Wrong. No One Should Want to Do That. Linux needs a near error-free install and desktop for the poeple who, God help them, don't WANT to know how to make their box jump through hoops. Let the would-be wizards comment out the dotfile lines themselves! Or like Lynx, choose your skill level, during the install. Wizards and users (I'm in the latter category, let me emphasize) know how to delete files. We can trade delete scripts on the Net to rid our boxes of stuff that Debian or RH should have known better than to include. :)