Sec=Unclassified RE: Proposal to donate the writing of an ebook/book

[Michael Steinberg]

I've found the documentation useful myself--including the Desktop 
Starter Guide--but I was thinking of a different audience. I couldn't 
possibly give even the starter guide to my father, the judge I used to 
work for, or to the guys at Poor People United and expect them to make 
sense of it. I am thinking of something that was really truly for 
beginners, that would be expansive in prose rather than telegraphic, 
would be friendly in tone and would walk them through things with 
screenshots and the like. There are an astoundingly large number of 
beginners out there who are totally stumped by computers; I seem to 
know lots of them.

The pdf'd sample chapter is about 345K; that may be a better way of 
explaining the idea. But I'll wait for an invite with a file that 
large.

Thanks, though, for warning me off writing about Automatx; it's a good 
cautionary note.

Michael Steinberg


On Jan 29, 2006, at 8:22 PM, Stoffers, Robert LAC wrote:

> Ubuntu already has a book like this, although its in xml form (nothing 
> stopping it being a ebook or whatever else), which I wrote for the 
> Breezy Badger release. Maybe you would like to contribute to this 
> instead, its in need of new writers right now. I'll leave it to others 
> to fill you in on the details of doing so.
>
> Also, some things like Automatrix and Easy Ubuntu are bad even for the 
> new users. What is gained by the ease of such tools is lost when it 
> breaks their systems, leaving the user with a bad after taste of 
> Linux.
>
> Regards,
>
> Robert Stoffers
> (author/ex-maintainer of the Ubuntu Desktop Guide)
>
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Michael Steinberg
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I like people, but I don't have very much in common with them.