[olpc-help] Reference

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

Steve Holton wrote:
> Isn' that a bit antithetical to the OLPC mission of constructionism?
> 
> The XO is a platform for learning. Which is to say there is no book that can
> teach you everything you could learn from the XO. I'd go further to say that
> being taught how to use the XO in a book degrades the learning experience.

Then perhaps a more appropriate way to do this would be to link to the
thousands (probably hundreds of thousands) of PDFs on the web with
Fedora tutorials. I guess the question I have is what it is Larry wants
to learn and why.

This is non-trivial on the XO because

a. By default, the "man" and "info" utilities and their data aren't
installed. It's not really a base Fedora machine, it's a stripped Fedora
machine with unique hardware and a GUI designed for exploration by children.

b. Some of us still cling to our dead-tree documents. I have to admit
that the XO is the first machine I've ever owned that I think has a
*serious* chance of replacing the book in my every day reading. For
example, I very often will download a technical paper on queuing theory
at work and print it out. And I have at least a dozen books on the
subject as well.

It's highly unlikely that all of the books will show up in PDF form on
the web, although two of the major ones in the specific application area
that I work in, computer performance evaluation, have gone out of print
and are available from their authors' web sites.