Documentation help

[Rob Smith]

Manjul Apratim <manjul.apratim at gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Kent,

I, and I am sure all others on the team, understand your plight. Indeed, traditionally GNU/Linux has been an indulgence for the geek, but Ubuntu is the first and biggest flavor that has sought to bring it to the masses, by invoking design goals from the end-user's perspective as opposed to the programmer's perspective alone. The preamble is included here:

http://www.ubuntu.com/project/about-ubuntu/our-philosophy

and that vision is very much now a reality, and by no means should you form the impression that you need to be a full-fledged programmer to dive into Ubuntu. The documentation has issues, and there is an effort underway to fix it from scratch, of which I am part, and it shall be fixed so, one step at a time. If you indeed go to Ubuntu.com and click on 'Support', and go to the 'Official Documentation', that contains a link to the 'Community Contributed Documentation', which is where you shall want to eventually be going for all your needs. The fact that this is convoluted to reach at the moment is an issue, and the centralization of the documentation is also being pushed for. So, to break free of the serfdom of Microsoft as many others including myself have in the past, I would urge you to proceed with your experiences with Ubuntu while reading the manual and ask for help on the Ubuntu forums, where people will certainly aid you with whatever troubles you run into. 

Manjul


Message: 2
Date: Sun, 12 Jun 2011 17:51:51 -0700 (PDT)
From: Kent Drugge <kedrugge at yahoo.com>
To: ubuntu-doc at lists.ubuntu.com
Subject: Documentation help
Message-ID: <601141.46718.qm at web113405.mail.gq1.yahoo.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii

To all,

My name is Kent, I work at a school district.  We've been looking to save costs like many schools these days.  Microsoft has always  been a pain in the rear.  I have a history of Unix in the past and we've thought of moving to Linux / Ubuntu as some other schools have done it.  My issue comes from reading the documentation about Ubuntu. It seems no matter what topic I try to learn about as a new user, it is very difficult because its written by people who know everything about Linux/Ubuntu. Page after page is filled with acronyms of services and apps who knows what.  Maybe I'm under the wrong impression. Maybe you don't want people who know nothing about Ubuntu, to become users.  Tonight I'm trying to read a server installation guide and its not for beginners.  When you go to Ubuntu.com there is no "Beginners start here"  If anyone ever intends to have the Linux world become a leader in Operating Systems, they're going to have to get out of Program mode
 instructing and into 8th grade teaching level for the rest of the world to become users.  I think Linux is great, it seems like Ubuntu might be great, but, right now, instruction is only geared toward the very well educated programmer.



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End of ubuntu-doc Digest, Vol 81, Issue 17
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-- 
Manjul Apratim


I would have to agree with Kent here. At present, if you aren't very familiar with working at the *NIX command line, it's a hard row to tow trying to set up a Linux server, and that includes Ubuntu. And, unless you are a coder, it's not much easier trying to help out with documentation. There seem to be no decent entry-level tutorials for the noon that has no programming experience. I will bet that there are many good folks out there who've given up because of the daunting task of just learning how to write or edit a paragraph of text for the Ubuntu documentation project.

Rob Smith
Sent from an Android phone
-- 
Sent from my Android phone with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.
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