On Wed, 30 Aug 2000, you wrote: > On Fri, Aug 25, 2000 at 07:45:44PM -0700, erik wrote: > > On Sun, 27 Aug 2000, you wrote: > > > On Fri, Aug 25, 2000 at 11:20:28AM -0700, erik wrote: > > > > This is simply an initial announcement of a new debian package called > > > > ddoc. > > cool! don't let them discourage you...
Thanks, I won't :). > the biggest drawback i can see in coming to linux in general > or to debian specifically, is that the documentation is > existent-but-buried, to the point it's nearly hidden. at > least from the newbie user. This is exactly the point that ddoc addresses. > hopefully you can come up with a 'help' alias that newbies > are likely to try, as well (nobody from mac or windows would > know to try the 'man' command to get help)! Unfortuantely "help" is already taken; bash ( which is frequently the default shell) issues a somewhat cryptic message listing its built in commands if you type help. My solution is this: When ddoc is installed it looks for update-menus and if it is there it puts itself on the system menu under "Help". Then all you need to do is click to start it and from there everything is a mouse driven browser interface. Very easy. Otherwise, if you aren't in X you can type "ddoc" and it will start lynx if its available. > > > > > > Have you seen what doc-central does (available as .deb in unstable > > > distro)? > > > See if you can integrate this functionality in it. > > if the doc-central thing they're talking about does what you're > after, maybe you can help them get going. if not, forge ahead doc-central didn't really work on my machines - and it immediately complained if it couldn't find a browser that supports frames. I didn't really fell like digging through a bunch of python scripts to figure out what it is supposed to do so I moved on from that - I don't see that it does any thing that ddoc doesn't already have. > and expect the thanks of many new debian users. the system is > really powerful, but us newbies have a hell of a time finding the > info we need to get our jobs done. Well, I hope it helps. BTW, you can get the latest version from the unilinux site: http://unilinux.sourceforge.net Follow the link to "Unilinux Project page" and down at the bottom of the page there is a link to "Anonymous FTP Space" - in there you'll find some ddoc-0.x.debs. Take the 0.4, and after you download it run (as root) "dpkg -i ddoc_0.4_all.deb" It may complain that there are some missing dependancies if you don't have everything it would like - don't worry, nothing is really broken despite any ugly messages. Just use "apt-get install (whatever is missng here)" eg: "apt-get install boa info2www man2html dwww dhelp" Or you can just select these in dselect. Dselect will also pick up some suggested packages that apt-get may miss so I recommend you use dselect. Then just run "dpkg -i" again and you'll have a nice help system :). Hopefully it will be `apt-getable' soon and this will be easier but for now its early so... well, try it out and see. > > keep it up! we need all the help we can get! :) OK, I hope this one helps. Enjoy! erik
