Date: Mon, 14 May 2001 08:47:10 +1000 From: Sue Blake <sue@welearn.com.au> To: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in> Cc: Kathy Quinlan <katinka@magestower.com>, N6REJ <n6rej@tcsn.net>, freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG, freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: I'm leaving Message-ID: <20010514084709.A68348@welearn.com.au> In-Reply-To: <20010513122623.I97034@lpt.ens.fr>; from rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in on Sun, May 13, 2001 at 12:26:23PM %2B0200 References: <002b01c0db54$e0febaa0$5599ca3f@disappointment> <20010513171444.E26123@welearn.com.au> <00f401c0db7e$ff3ca2a0$fe00a8c0@kat.lan> <20010513122623.I97034@lpt.ens.fr>
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On Sun, May 13, 2001 at 12:26:23PM +0200, Rahul Siddharthan wrote: > > Often you can find the answers in the docs if you know where to look. And that is exactly the problem faced by many newbies: not knowing where to look, nor realising they're there when they've found it. They can't tell because there are concepts that they don't have, and when they look at the documentation they might find vaguely familiar words which are not used in every day speech and which have a particular meaning to people with a formal computer education. The man pages do this a lot. For example, in ls(1) we have a few words that probably won't be understood without unix knowledge, and I have no problem with that. Words like "FIFO", "symbolic link", etc need to be looked up in a unix text somewhere and learned. Until then, you are not so likely to need the relatively more advanced stuff that they are found in. Part of the deal is learning about these things. What really stumps people is when, reading in that partially familiar environment, they must stop and try to figure out more common sounding words like: lexicographical order reursively whiteouts deprecated colon-delimited With these, once you've seen them in a unix context they're obvious, but they don't have instant meaning that leaps out for a beginner. Some man pages restate these in more common words or show very easy examples where their meanings are apparent. Our man pages for the common user and setup commands could be improved by a going-over with this perspective in mind, perhaps referring to others such as the Tru64 man pages for ideas. In other documents, such as the Handbook, we could use something like a newbie review team to make sure that unnecessary difficulties don't creep in or they are linked to explanations or a glossary. That'd be lot of work. Meanwhile we have to be more aware of the nature of their difficulties. > But I find that most people (even intelligent, computer-literate > people) get intimidated by it, even though it works well and the ports > system etc are appealing. These people have problems with the chaotic > nature of linux distributions: but for some reason they find it too > difficult to adjust to the FreeBSD mindset, even when it's > demonstrated to them that you can easily do with FreeBSD just about > anything you can do with Linux. Yep. There might only be one or two things that are hard to understand, but they are presented in such a foreign and frighteneing environment that suddenly nothing makes sense and it's not clear exactly where the problem is. Then asking questions about it is real tricky. > Would it be a good idea to have a "default GUI install" as one of the > install options, which sets up either KDE or GNOME, and a web browser, > and desktop icons for the HTML-ised version of the FreeBSD handbook? > Then when the user logs in and wants to learn more about the system, > there's no need to poke around in /usr/share/doc (many people don't > seem to realise it exists, until it's pointed out to them): they can > just click and read. Some sort of tweak could be made to the > KDE/GNOME help browsers to include the basic FreeBSD stuff there too. While that would be great, the person in this case was having trouble getting his head around what was required to install, a problem that exceeded what he had managed to extract from the docs. Not even a GUI install would help with the conceptual problems. I include part of his -questions post below as an example. I can't figure out what he wants, but I can tell that he's really thinking and applying himself to solving the problem. His previously good conceptual tools have let him down and diligent reading of the docs has't saved him. On Mon, May 07, 2001 at 11:36:23PM -0700, N6REJ wrote: <snip> > the major thing I'm not too sure about is whether I should tell it I want it > to put things in the boot partition or not, and then wether I need to make > drive c "bootable" or not. I mean I know it needs to be for dos, and it is > currently of course, but FBSD does'nt seem to recognize that fact. I > thought I had it done right this morning but after I powered down it said > bad partition. > I want c: drive to be accesible as /c and d: as /d: ( ESPECIALLY D: ) which > are both FAT32 so that I can easily retrieve files I have stored there and > put somethere 2 if I choose too. What you see above is a person coming to FreeBSD with some decent working knowledge of his old environment, applying those concepts that he has already to try to understand what's required for installing FreeBSD. It's useless to tell him to forget his old OS, because at his point there is no way to tell which concepts are microsoftisms and which are not. No way. We who know more than he have to meet him in the middle until we have a common language. Because we can. > I really don't think it's so difficult to use FreeBSD if you read the > docs, but many people don't realise just how good the docs are... Heartily agreed. But it depends so much on where you're coming from. I raise again the old example doc http://www.welearn.com.au/freebsd/slow/ready.html People say this summary is very harsh, and I agree, but nobody can point to parts of it and agree that that knowledge is _not_ a preprequisite. There is no path to success without a clear starting point. We need to rethink: Exactly what are we expecting newcomers to know, and why can't we state those expectations clearly? -- Regards, -*Sue*- To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-newbies" in the body of the message
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