On Jul 2, 12:39pm, Neil A Carson wrote:
> Subject: Re: First attempt partly successful (very long)
> On Tue, 2 Jul 1996, Daniel Pead wrote:
>
> > On Mon 01 Jul, Kjetil Bernhard Thomassen wrote:
> >
> > > My conclusion about RiscBSD so far is that it is not suitable for
> > > people without UNIX system administrator experience.
> > >
> >
> > Isn't that a bit of a truism? After all, one would assume that anybody
> > trying to install a beta version of a freeware UNIX implementation would
> > either have UNIX system administration experience or would be eager to
> > learn the hard way (I'm a firm believer in vertical learning curves!).
>
> Yup. People shouldn't get a proper UNIX (linux not being proper!) without
> really knowing what to do. They'd best go to an already-setup system and
> start learning from the top down.
>
> I think we need to start thinking as to exactly what sort of product
> RiscBSD is targetted as being. Ought we to go for the user friendly side
> of things, do nice manuals formatted in LaTeX etc, maybe printed and
> buyable, or ought all time to be spent in development?

Congratualtions. You win this year's award for using 'LaTeX' and 'user
friendly' in the same sentence in cold blood :-)

> I wonder if the rest of the KT have any other thoughts on this.

Personally I intend to worry about the code side of things mainly. If people
want to package it prettily and do a RiscBSD equivalent of a Red Hat
distribution or something I have no problems with that - we can't do everything
and the coding needs doing by somebody. One of the problems with making things
'easy to use' is that it is very easy to fail to anticipate the needs of a user
and if the user interface screws up it is particularly bad (eg inst with
x11r6base et al). Another thing is, once you get past the basic installation
most stuff is machine independant so needs to be addressed at the NetBSD level.

If you (or anyone else) are volunteering to write documentation and make sure
it is kept up to date I wish you the very best of luck.

Cheers

Rob Black

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