Re: Introductory GNOME Basics Tutorial

[Joachim Noreiko <jnoreiko yahoo com>]

--- Christian Rose <menthos gnome org> wrote:

> At my university, we're been replacing hundreds of
> old Sun machines
> with Linux boxes. Now it's time for us to finally
> replace the old
> Solaris with TWM environment with a more modern
> GNOME one (for the
> curious, it's GNOME 2.8 on top of Debian Sarge).
> Yes, it's not the
> latest, but things are moving slowly here.

Woohoo! Welcome to 2004! ;)

> To make things more exciting, and to make sure that
> there was some
> actual comprehension going on rather than just
> skimming the
> instructions, there would be some relatively easy
> questions to answer
> inbetween the instructions, like "now you know what
> buttons A and B
> do, but what does button C do?"

By the by, that's an excellent example of why a
one-button mouse is better. You don't have to commit
anything to memory: once you've grasped the physical
aspect of it, it's as intuitive as pointing with your
finger.

An introductory guide should not mention
right-clicking  or keyboard shortcuts -- or only in
passing that they exist, just to explain what the
"Ctrl-thing" bits in menus mean, and why mice even
have more than one button anyway. 

I have watched too many beginners laboriously write
this sort of thing down on their notepads (and then
try to memorize it) because their tutorial told them
these "shortcuts" instead of depending on more
intuitive menu commands.
 
> Is there someone working on something like this? Is
> anyone interested
> in working on this?
> 
> We know of the Intro
> (http://www.gnome.org/learn/intro/2.2/), but the
> pictures are broken, and the text could probably
> need some
> improvements. What's worse is that it hasn't been
> updated since GNOME
> 2.2.

It looks like that Intro lives here in CVS:
http://cvs.gnome.org/viewcvs/gnome-user-docs/introduction-to-gnome/

The actual XML files are marked as dead, presumably
because they have not been updated for years.

I'm currently busy with a few different docs and
gnome-web, but this is certainly the sort of document
we could work on and put in our shiny new library when
it opens (library.gnome.org).
Any takers?

Joachim


		
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