Re: Upset

[Calum Benson <Calum Benson Sun COM>]

On Mon, 2007-06-18 at 22:38 +0100, Jean-Paul wrote:

> First big thing about Gnome and so on is the "command on line", so they 
> say. But, where to you find a help, short and concise, that does not 
> spend pages and pages talking about the beauty of the stuff, but simply 
> gives a list of all the functions available at your fingertips with 
> their options:
> 3 columns: function, options, explanation of what that does.

Have you tried the GNOME User Guide?  If you're using Ubuntu, it should
already be installed on your machine (select Help from the panel menu),
but it's online too:
http://www.gnome.org/learn/users-guide/latest/

No marketing fluff, it just tells you how to do stuff.

Admittedly it doesn't just 'list all the functions available' in a
table-- I don't know of such a list (unless we have some sort of feature
list for marketing purposes), because experience tells us that's not
helpful to most users.  Instead, it's focuses more on helping you if
you're stuck with a particular task.  I don't think anyone here would
claim that it's perfect, by any means, but I'm sure the docs team would
be happy to have you on board to help put things right.

> Other frustration: something clear, neat, to the point about how to 
> manage in the real world: administration level. I believe I did the 
> set-up correctly and I have all the full rights on my PC, but I still 
> cannot modify a system file without passing through hours of complicated 
> procedures via... the command line. A bit short to compete with 
> Microsoft and the like.

I'm not sure what complicated procedures you're referring to here, or
why it takes hours; on the command line, all you should have to do on
Ubuntu is type 'sudo' before your usual editing command.

If want to avoid the command line altogether, you're free to add a menu
item or panel icon that runs 'gksu gedit' (or your editor of choice),
then you're just a click away from a graphical text editor with which
you can edit any file on your system, without having to touch the
command line.

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson sun com            GNOME Desktop Group
http://ie.sun.com                      +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems