Michael raises a good point:
People tend to be indoctrinated with reinstalling when they come across a
problem with no simple solution.

One of my biggest gripes about the Windows and even Mac platforms, is
the inherent user blindness to internals that's part of the interface
design. Unix OS's expose the internals very easily, which is something
that made the transition to Unix from pre-DOS5/6 so easy.

As desktop environments for Linux evolve, some of this same blindness is
creeping in through poor design, when it really shouldn't. Even subtle
things like broken desktop icons or errors that go nowhere, we, as a user
group, should be spotting these when our newer users run across them and
passing them back up the chain. I mention newer users because some of
simply won't notice some of these quirks, and users transitioning from
Windows or Mac expect to see *some* result when they try something.

Perhaps it's time to start looking at changes to things like syslog and
raising its output into desktop user space.

- billn

On Fri, 12 Sep 2003, Michael Havens wrote:

> If you all are going to install a working Distro on newbies computers  you
> need to take it a step further. You need to write down what you do to get
> their computer going. I mean the first working Linux I had operating on my
> box was Mandrake put onto it by a kind user. Well I formated my HD accidently
> and had to reinstall it myself but it was not working (modem problems). To
> make matters worse I could not find the kind user to tell me how he got it
> working. Now I have debian (installed through knoppix) and I figured out what
> to do to get the modem going but there are some icons on the desktop that
> will not work! (these are the 'CD-ROM' and 'Floppy disk' icons)
> So, as you can see (I hope), we need to give people some persoalized
> documentation. I mean we handed out knoppix CDs but that was all. When I
> first got my knoppix CD I had not a clue what to do with it.
> --
> <:-)~MIKE~(-:>
>
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