My first post : Ubuntu Desktop Guide - Connecting to the Internet

[Karderio]

Hello !

This is my first post to this mailing list, I currently contribute to
the GNOME documentation, your organization seems similar so I'm just
winging it after having glanced at your info in the wiki.

Although I do not yet use Ubuntu (I will install it besides Gentoo
when dapper comes out) I place quite a bit of hope in it's potential
to help the masses adopt libre software. To me it seems to be the
distribution best placed to provide "non technical" users with an easy
to use and libre operating system. I think therefor that contributing
to Ubuntu will also contribute to the libre software community at
large, which is important to me.

I installed Dapper at a friends house last week, we had an awful time
getting his ADSL USB modem to work (surprise surprise :), but we
managed it in the end with lots of visits to third party websites and
long trips to next door to use his brothers broadband. This experience
highlighted for me a few things that seemed missing from the Ubuntu CD
and website.

First of all there is very little information on how to get connected
to Internet in the desktop guide (in Yelp) : it only mentions ADSL
Modems and Winmodems, and then all useful information is provided as
links to the wiki, which we found rather silly.

Second there was not very much info about connecting to the net on the
Ubuntu site or wiki. For  my friends ADI eagle based USB modem we used
only third party sites to get connected (there was one document,
mentioned in a package description when installing the drivers, but
you needed to know which driver to use for the modem before noticing
that, plus the method described in this document did not actually
work).

I would think having prominent information on how to setup an Internet
connection in the online docs (those available in yelp after
installation) is important. Getting connected to the Internet would be
one of the first things a user does, in order to get support and
install software, so easy access to documentation seems primordial. Of
course not needing an Internet connection to view the documentation on
connecting to the net would also be very practical.

I have been hacking on the wiki for a couple of days (mainly pages
linked to from https://wiki.ubuntu.com/InternetHowto), but there is
still a lot of work to do. I don't know if this information is
acceptable for the desktop guide (when the docs are more complete, I
will read your style guide and apply this).

I would be happy to continue to complete the wiki as best I can and
convert this to docbook if you would like to include this in the
documentation.

Is it too late to get any mods into Dapper before release ? I don't
see any translations, so I suppose it could be possible...

I hope to be able to contribute to this exciting project, I have many
more remarks on this subject, but I don't want to bore anyone with a
mile long post just yet, so I'll await any comments anxiously ;)

Love, Karderio