1.1

I just finished my undergrad. About two years ago I took up Gentoo as a student on my own and the handbook was the best linux doc I'd ever seen at that point.  My first hand experience helping classmates is similar to yours however. There is a huge gap to be bridged for windows / mac / gnome / kde users to get into gentoo.  Huge like, what's a kernel and why should I configure it, or the fact that tar.bz2 is a compressed file tree, not an executable install file ala windows setup.exe.  I seriously had a classmate ask me half way through the semester of my operating systems course how to change the current directory.  He never used DOS growing up, like most kids my age.

Things like chroot, tar and symbolic links are demonstrated but their practical application is not well explained.  Do you annoy the savvy or help the newbies?

Chad

-----Original Message-----
From: Ted Kosan [mailto:tkosan@...]
Sent: Tue 6/5/2007 1:33 AM
To: gentoo-doc@g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-doc]  DRobbins 2007.0 review
 
Josh Saddler wrote:

> Changing it will not help the most central problem
> we're up against: that users simply *do not read* documents, period.
> It's not in their nature. No amount of restructuring or other
> handholding will change that for them; they have to take the plunge into
> the technical world of Gentoo on their own.

In the college freshman course I taught with the Handbook over the past few
years, everyone read the Handbook ( I know because I was in the computer lab
looking over their shoulders while they were reading it ) but only around 2 in
each class of 25 were able to successfully install Gentoo without significant
assistance.

My observation of students that attempt to install Gentoo on their own (
outside of this class and without assistance ) is that very few of them are
successful.

I agree that most people do not read the documentation and this is why they
fail.  My experience indicates, however, that a significant percentage of
people are reading the Handbook but are still failing because the materials in
the Handbook are not meeting their needs.

Ted
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