> Let us stop this for now.
>
> When I quoted my daughter I did it because I thought it
> was witty, not because I thought that she formulated an
> eternal truth.
>
>> From her remarks as a complete newcomer to Linux, I
>> thought that something good or pedagogic could be
>> extracted. I assumed that any other newcomer to Linux
>> might find it simple to be able to reach out to all
>> forms of documents on Linux in one consistent manner
>> through that icon.
>
> I still hold that view but we seem to differ.
I personally don't want to stop this thread, because I
think your daughter has a valid point and I agree with
it.
Up until I read your post, I had actually never clicked
"Doc". I don't know why, but I hadn't. So I did, and I
saw two links there:
- Installation Guide and User Guide
- Reference Manual
Now, if I remember correctly (let me double check with
RPM.. yup), I have quite a few pieces of documentation
installed..
howto-html-en
faq
lame
lpg
(countless others)
.. and not to mention everything in /usr/share/doc/.
Now, I know where the documentation is (I've learned
where to search after 7 years of mucking with Slack, RH,
Turbo, and finally Mandrake). But why can't the "Doc"
icon provide an easy interface to these items as well?
Don't want to have a whole bunch of broken links if
they're not installed? Well, put a temporary placeholder
where they should be that says something like, "This
documentation package is not installed. Please insert
your Mandrake CD-ROM and install the blah-blah.rpm
package".
Man pages, you say? There's quite a few man2html
programs out there, I took one and modified it for my own
personal use quite a while back. The one I have does it
on the fly, so you don't have to have a static set of
HTML files.
Now, before someone flies off the handle at me with their
opinion, take a step back and look at where Mandrake is
going, and see where they excel currently, and tell me my
logic is incorrect (and please tell me if I'm incorrect):
- Mandrake is one of the top-selling Linux distributions
in the U.S. retail market
(Many people are buying it off the shelves, and I'm sure
a good portion of these are people that have never used
Linux/UNIX)
- Mandrake is one of the easiest distributions to use
(Newbies like it because they don't have to get their
hands dirty right away, they can install it, use it, and
learn it at their own pace, and the GUI is intuitive so
they can)
- Mandrake gears itself towards new users
(I have never seen a Linux distribution work so hard at
making something that both hard-core/power users AND new
users can use, and use effectively)
I think that one of Linux's great faults is lack of
organized documentation. The Linux Documentation Project
has gone a long way to improving this, but there is still
a long way to go. It's now up to the distributions to
fill the gaps.
Now..
Mandrake developers, on your TODO list, could you please
add an item to work on a way of using the "Doc" icon to
integrate all the different forms of Linux documentation
that you install?
I think that's all we're asking for..
Don Head
SAIR LCA, CIW-P, Network+, A+
Systems Administrator [ [EMAIL PROTECTED] ]
Web Designer [ 1 314 997-7847 ]
[ AIM - Don Wave ] [ ICQ - 18804935 ] [ Yahoo - Don_Wave ]
