Date: Sun, 1 Mar 1998 21:59:13 -0800 (PST) From: Annelise Anderson <andrsn@andrsn.stanford.edu> To: Sue Blake <sue@welearn.com.au> Cc: freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: newbies mailing list Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.96.980301210912.26963A-100000@andrsn.stanford.edu> In-Reply-To: <19980301181929.41719@welearn.com.au>
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[cc list trimmed] A newbies mailing list might be a good idea--the question that arises is who's going to staff it? It seems Sue has sort of been drafted....I think it will be a fairly demanding project. Here are a few points I would make: 1) It would be interesting to know what difficulties people run into with the current methods of documentation/help. To find out you'd have to a a survey of perhaps a sample of people who have bought FreeBSD on cdrom from Walnut Creek (this may be the most comprehensive list), in an effort to find out about the people who gave up as well as those who succeeded. 2) FreeBSD-questions has a rather remarkable group of people answering questions. Doug White handles lots of stuff (I assume he's still doing it, although I haven't read questions for a few months); and in specific areas, people who are especially interested in particular problems watch for questions that may indicate problems or things they should cover in the section of the handbook they've written, and so forth. Brian Sommers (that may be misspelled) handles ppp, Charles Kukulies (also misspelled, sorry) almost always responds on samba questions, Sean Kelly watches out for printing problems, and Greg Lehey handles just about everything....and so forth. This is world-class help. 3) There's also the newsgroup--Joerg Wunsch and others. 4) Finally, there's irc. On what I think is called EFNet there's #unixhelp, which is exactly where a lot of newbies need to be-- quite a few of their problems are problems with basic unix skills. (The #freebsd channel rarely has anything to do with FreeBSD or unix and is pretty useless; on the other hand #windows and #windowsnt have some participants who use FreeBSD and are pretty good. IRC is of course always problematic, but when it works, it works very well indeed.) I sometimes answer questions on #unixhelp (and ask a few, too) and it's readily apparent that some people seem to think they have a right to the time and attention of others without making any effort at all. They get slammed around a bit, and I can't say I really find it unjustified. The benefit of irc is that it's interactive, so it's possible to help people clarify their questions quite quickly. 5) I'd say the greatest weakness in FreeBSD's outreach to new users is that the process of getting some basic documents (the FAQ, the handbook) from the web site or the ftp site or the cdrom and being able to view them on screen and also print them (or a particular section) is not clear or obvious. The freebsd-doc mailing list has questions every now and then on how to do this with one or another version of MS DOS/Windows, and certainly these documents should be easy to obtain and use for people who have not yet installed FreeBSD. Nevertheless, the standard answers these people get advise using unix utilities (col -b is a favorite) that aren't on their dos/win machines. I actually don't know what a good answer might be; if I want an up-to-date copy of the FAQ or the handbook, I get the sources and make it. Annelise To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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