Re: How can the OS autodetect that a user is a newbie and offer help?

2006-10-23 Thread Jason Spiro
2006/10/17, Javier Fernández-Sanguino Peña [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Tue, Oct 17, 2006 at 01:02:45PM +, Jason Spiro wrote: I remember back in 2000 providing a Debian package called 'ayuda' ('help', in Spanish) developed by members of my local IEEE Student Branch. This package included

Re: Fwd: How can the OS autodetect that a user is a newbie and offer help?

2006-10-19 Thread Wouter Verhelst
On Wed, Oct 18, 2006 at 10:26:26AM -0200, Yves Junqueira wrote: It may be much cleaner to include help links /etc/motd, adivising the user to read a hipothetical /usr/share/doc/linux-beginners/new-users, or enter a help-mode by typing a certain command. Or we could mimic FreeBSD behaviour:

Re: Fwd: How can the OS autodetect that a user is a newbie and offer help?

2006-10-19 Thread Thomas Viehmann
Wouter Verhelst wrote: Or we could mimic FreeBSD behaviour: create a fortune-file with helpful tips for newbies, and add a line in the default initialization files (i.e., those in /etc/skel) for different shells that calls fortune for those tips. You mean like fortunes-debian-hints[1]? Kind

Re: Fwd: How can the OS autodetect that a user is a newbie and offer help?

2006-10-19 Thread Wouter Verhelst
On Thu, Oct 19, 2006 at 10:58:42AM +0200, Thomas Viehmann wrote: Wouter Verhelst wrote: Or we could mimic FreeBSD behaviour: create a fortune-file with helpful tips for newbies, and add a line in the default initialization files (i.e., those in /etc/skel) for different shells that calls

Re: Fwd: How can the OS autodetect that a user is a newbie and offer help?

2006-10-19 Thread Eduard Bloch
#include hallo.h * Thomas Viehmann [Thu, Oct 19 2006, 10:58:42AM]: Wouter Verhelst wrote: Or we could mimic FreeBSD behaviour: create a fortune-file with helpful tips for newbies, and add a line in the default initialization files (i.e., those in /etc/skel) for different shells that calls

Re: Fwd: How can the OS autodetect that a user is a newbie and offer help?

2006-10-19 Thread Gustavo Noronha Silva
Em Wed, 18 Oct 2006 10:26:26 -0200 Yves Junqueira [EMAIL PROTECTED] escreveu: It may be much cleaner to include help links /etc/motd, adivising the user to read a hipothetical /usr/share/doc/linux-beginners/new-users, or enter a help-mode by typing a certain command. Much cleaner, but I

Re: How can the OS autodetect that a user is a newbie and offer help?

2006-10-19 Thread Peter Samuelson
[Sander Marechal] True, but I meant that an app can kill X, requiring it to be restarted. Newbies get very confused at that point. Look, if you typed startx once, you can type it again. If you didn't, it means you're using a display manager like xdm, and xdm will restart X when it dies. If X

Re: How can the OS autodetect that a user is a newbie and offer help?

2006-10-19 Thread Andrew Vaughan
On Friday 20 October 2006 08:06, Peter Samuelson wrote: [Sander Marechal] True, but I meant that an app can kill X, requiring it to be restarted. Newbies get very confused at that point. Look, if you typed startx once, you can type it again. If you didn't, it means you're using a display

Re: How can the OS autodetect that a user is a newbie and offer help?

2006-10-18 Thread Javier Fernández-Sanguino Peña
On Tue, Oct 17, 2006 at 11:48:33PM -0400, Jason Spiro wrote: I remember back in 2000 providing a Debian package called 'ayuda' ('help', in Spanish) developed by members of my local IEEE Student Branch. This package included just a simple shell script ('ayuda') and a number of text files.

Re: How can the OS autodetect that a user is a newbie and offer help?

2006-10-18 Thread Sander Marechal
Alexey Feldgendler wrote: In a desktop environment, the user needs to do a special action to run the shell (such as starting the Gnome Terminal). It's somewhat unlikely that the user ends up in the scary black screen by accident, and even then he can easily find the familiar close button in

Re: How can the OS autodetect that a user is a newbie and offer help?

2006-10-18 Thread Roberto C. Sanchez
On Wed, Oct 18, 2006 at 08:36:06AM +0200, Sander Marechal wrote: If something happens to X then a user can end up in the terminal. Even a faulty application can trash X. I don't believe that an application can trash X so badly that it won't start anymore. Misconfiguring X can certainly

Re: How can the OS autodetect that a user is a newbie and offer help?

2006-10-18 Thread Roberto C. Sanchez
On Tue, Oct 17, 2006 at 09:01:16PM -0500, Ron Johnson wrote: We who used MS-DOS in 1985 were not appreciably smarter than people are now, yet we figured out DIR COPY DEL CD. A HELP command and a set of DOS-friendly aliases (and/or scripts) would/should be adequate. Yes, but much of

Fwd: How can the OS autodetect that a user is a newbie and offer help?

2006-10-18 Thread Yves Junqueira
Forwarding to the list. -- Forwarded message -- From: Yves Junqueira [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Oct 17, 2006 2:42 PM Subject: Re: How can the OS autodetect that a user is a newbie and offer help? To: Jason Spiro [EMAIL PROTECTED] On 10/17/06, Jason Spiro [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

Re: How can the OS autodetect that a user is a newbie and offer help?

2006-10-18 Thread Mike O'Connor
+++ Roberto C. Sanchez [17/10/06 20:27 -0400]: IIRC, the majority of the I ended up at a text prompt, what do I do now? questions we see on d-u are not X configuration problems. They are newbies who pick all the defaults and up without X on their systems entirely. Yes. And this type of

Re: How can the OS autodetect that a user is a newbie and offer help?

2006-10-18 Thread Javier Fernández-Sanguino Peña
On Wed, Oct 18, 2006 at 03:57:26AM -0400, Roberto C. Sanchez wrote: I agree that a help command and a set of DOS-friendly aliases *should* be enough, but since MS neutered the command.com interface a long time ago to the point where it ceased to be useful, I don't see how having such things

Re: How can the OS autodetect that a user is a newbie and offer help?

2006-10-18 Thread Sander Marechal
Roberto C. Sanchez wrote: On Wed, Oct 18, 2006 at 08:36:06AM +0200, Sander Marechal wrote: If something happens to X then a user can end up in the terminal. Even a faulty application can trash X. I don't believe that an application can trash X so badly that it won't start anymore. True, but

How can the OS autodetect that a user is a newbie and offer help?

2006-10-17 Thread Jason Spiro
Hi all, I believe that since command-line Linux is hard to learn, Debian should offer handholding. (This would benefit both Debian users who are new to the command line and How can the OS autodetect that a user is a newbie and offer help? For example, when a person types newbie commands like

Re: How can the OS autodetect that a user is a newbie and offer help?

2006-10-17 Thread Mario Iseli
On Tue, Oct 17, 2006 at 01:02:45PM +, Jason Spiro wrote: Hi all, I believe that since command-line Linux is hard to learn, Debian should offer handholding. (This would benefit both Debian users who are new to the command line and How can the OS autodetect that a user is a newbie and

Re: How can the OS autodetect that a user is a newbie and offer help?

2006-10-17 Thread Jason Spiro
On 2006-10-17, Mario Iseli [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: We could start together a project which does this shell scripts, I think it's not really a lot of work. Don't file a bug, first we can do a linuxnewbie program and someone (maybe myself) will build a debian package one day. Has anyone ever

Re: How can the OS autodetect that a user is a newbie and offer help?

2006-10-17 Thread Goswin von Brederlow
Hi, let me respond to the subject. I don't know about the rest of the mail, sorry. Anyway, the usual way to detect a newbie and give help to them seems to be to assume everyone a newbie and give little hints, startup tips, ... till they learn enough to turn them off. For examples see gimp or mc.

Re: How can the OS autodetect that a user is a newbie and offer help?

2006-10-17 Thread Jason Spiro
On 2006-10-17, Goswin von Brederlow [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: [snip] Anyway, the usual way to detect a newbie and give help to them seems to be to assume everyone a newbie and give little hints, startup tips, ... till they learn enough to turn them off. For examples see gimp or mc. PS: One

Re: How can the OS autodetect that a user is a newbie and offer help?

2006-10-17 Thread Ron Johnson
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On 10/17/06 08:02, Jason Spiro wrote: Hi all, I believe that since command-line Linux is hard to learn, Debian should offer handholding. (This would benefit both Debian users who are new to the command line and How can the OS autodetect that a

Re: How can the OS autodetect that a user is a newbie and offer help?

2006-10-17 Thread Andrew Vaughan
On Wednesday 18 October 2006 05:41, you wrote: On 2006-10-17, Goswin von Brederlow [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: [snip] Anyway, the usual way to detect a newbie and give help to them seems to be to assume everyone a newbie and give little hints, startup tips, ... till they learn enough to

Re: How can the OS autodetect that a user is a newbie and offer help?

2006-10-17 Thread Javier Fernández-Sanguino Peña
On Tue, Oct 17, 2006 at 01:02:45PM +, Jason Spiro wrote: Hi all, Hi there. For example, when a person types newbie commands like help or kde (which is bound to something already) or the DOS commands del or ren (which are not), we should point them to more help. (In case anyone here has

Re: How can the OS autodetect that a user is a newbie and offer help?

2006-10-17 Thread David Nusinow
On Wed, Oct 18, 2006 at 08:36:42AM +1000, Andrew Vaughan wrote: What's really needed is better help for newbies dumped unexpectedly at the command-line because X wasn't installed/properly configured/didn't start. What's really needed is to fix our X autoconfiguration mechanisms so that this

Re: How can the OS autodetect that a user is a newbie and offer help?

2006-10-17 Thread Roberto C. Sanchez
On Tue, Oct 17, 2006 at 07:56:00PM -0400, David Nusinow wrote: On Wed, Oct 18, 2006 at 08:36:42AM +1000, Andrew Vaughan wrote: What's really needed is better help for newbies dumped unexpectedly at the command-line because X wasn't installed/properly configured/didn't start. What's really

Re: How can the OS autodetect that a user is a newbie and offer help?

2006-10-17 Thread David Nusinow
On Tue, Oct 17, 2006 at 08:27:46PM -0400, Roberto C. Sanchez wrote: On Tue, Oct 17, 2006 at 07:56:00PM -0400, David Nusinow wrote: On Wed, Oct 18, 2006 at 08:36:42AM +1000, Andrew Vaughan wrote: What's really needed is better help for newbies dumped unexpectedly at the command-line

Re: How can the OS autodetect that a user is a newbie and offer help?

2006-10-17 Thread Ron Johnson
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On 10/17/06 19:35, David Nusinow wrote: On Tue, Oct 17, 2006 at 08:27:46PM -0400, Roberto C. Sanchez wrote: On Tue, Oct 17, 2006 at 07:56:00PM -0400, David Nusinow wrote: On Wed, Oct 18, 2006 at 08:36:42AM +1000, Andrew Vaughan wrote: [snip] This

Re: How can the OS autodetect that a user is a newbie and offer help?

2006-10-17 Thread Alexey Feldgendler
On Tue, 17 Oct 2006 20:02:45 +0700, Jason Spiro [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: For example, when a person types newbie commands like help or kde (which is bound to something already) or the DOS commands del or ren (which are not), we should point them to more help. (In case anyone here has ever

Re: How can the OS autodetect that a user is a newbie and offer help?

2006-10-17 Thread Jason Spiro
[I have snipped everything except the words I am replying to.] 2006/10/17, Javier Fernández-Sanguino Peña [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I think 'help' is by far the most common one ('?' might be close too). Currently 'help' brings bash's help which might not be what a newbie expected. Some (older?)