The Newbie's Perspective

[Dave A. Chakrabarti]

Hi all,

This is my first post to the list. I just realized that I no longer use 
Dreamweaver much, and Dweaver was my last tie binding me to the MS 
world. So I'm ready to switch. I've played with Mandrake and with 
Knoppix in the past, but never seriously.

I'm interested in making Ubuntu my first real FL/OSS desktop, replacing 
MS entirely. In the process, I'm interested in writing documentation of 
a true newbie experience with Ubuntu. I'm thinking of this as a 
combination of contributions to Ubuntu docs, how-to guides on my site 
and elsewhere, and blog postings / thoughts.

I feel strongly that one of the areas in which documentation fails is 
that it is rarely written by members of the community it is aimed 
at...instead, it is written by techs or other technocrats who are trying 
to address what they imagine are newbie issues while "talking down" in a 
language newbies can understand. A solution seems to be for a newbie 
(like myself) to write documentation while negotiation the various 
learning curves involved with making the switch. Simply keeping detailed 
notes while working on various projects seem to be an adequate 
foundation for such a process.

Let me know where I should start. My urgent quest is to find a way to 
make the wireless cards on my laptop / desktop work under Ubuntu, 
because without wireless I can't even consider switching to Ubuntu.

   Thanks,

    Dave.

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Dave A. Chakrabarti
Projects Coordinator
CTCNet Chicago
dave at ctcnetchicago.org
(708) 919 1026
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