Forum and Docs for beginners was Re: Introduction

[Charles Davis]

On Sat, 2008-06-07 at 18:44 +0100, Phil Bull wrote:
> Hi Charles,
> 
> On Thu, 2008-06-05 at 01:44 -0600, Charles Davis wrote:
> > Greetings,
> > My name is Charles Davis and I am a member of the Ubuntu Beginners Team
> > (forums and launchpad). I would like to apply for the Documentation Team
> > mentoring program in the hopes of providing additional service to the
> > Ubuntu Community by helping out in an area other than the Ubuntu
> > Community Forums.
> > 
> > I am a long time Debian User (since 1997) and have used Ubuntu since
> > Edgy, I like helping the community and feel that I could be an asset to
> > the Documentation team in addition to the help I try to provide on the
> > Ubuntu Community Forums. My UCF profile is located at
> > http://ubuntuforums.org/member.php?u=487991 and my launchpad is
> > https://launchpad.net/~oldsoldier-gmail I am looking forward to meeting
> > the team and helping the project by working on Ubuntu Documentation, if
> > necessary I can work on Xubuntu Documentation or Kubuntu Documentation
> > if there are shortfalls in those subteams or wherever the help is needed
> > the most.
> 
> Welcome! You can find some ideas for tasks on our wiki page [1], but in
> light of your forum experience I'd be really interested in your opinions
> on how we can improve the documentation for beginners. For example, are
> there some specific questions which beginners frequently ask, but which
> we don't currently address in the documentation?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Phil
> 
> [1] - https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DocumentationTeam
> 
Hi Phil,
Thanks for the welcome- I'm glad to be involved in this rather
intimidating undertaking. Documentation is a huge project!

Some very commonly asked questions in the forum as far as new users are
concerned deal with customizing the desktop. As nick mentioned earlier
installing themes and icons from gnome look is a bit confusing to them.
We also deal a lot with simple trouble shooting such as "x wont start"
and "Ubuntu drops to busybox shell after installing" Of course these are
better handled in the wiki than in the system docs.

For new users I think a little more emphasis could be placed on
troubleshooting in some sections of the system docs. Many new users have
a hard time figuring out what to do when they are told to run dpkg
--configure -a , let alone what to do if /etc/apt/sorces.list has a
malformed line 60 :)

More thoughts as they come.

Regards,
Chuck

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