[Olpc-open] firendly manual

[Michael Burns]

On Dec 24, 2007 7:01 AM, gnome <gnome at greenglim.com> wrote:

> 1) Include a printed "map" of the keyboard, ports, and external features
> *with the machine when it arrives*!  This might be a good idea
> everywhere.  Kids will figure it out by playing around, that's true, but
> they may also try plugging in that old cell phone charger that's lying
> around with perhaps not-so-good consequences.
>

Sounds like we need someone with a bit of Gimp skill to gloss up some nice
pictures. The User guide has some images, and the Keyboard wiki article, for
instance, has some useful bits to pull together.

We should gather some pictures (flickr.com has thousands of XO images
released under creative commons by now) and throw something together on the
wiki. If it gets quality, we can export a pdf version of it.

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Keyboard


>
> Also include a *printer friendly* version on the web site.  The current
> mouseover pages have all the info and look great, but you should see
> what my scribbled reference printout looks like.


Part of what we include with each laptop is the Library and Content. A
series of documents, links and resources to using and accessing free
material. For instance, public domain book texts (essentially, early 1900s
or before) from Project Gutenberg might be included on a future XO.

We could expand that,  potentially, to include the User Guide translated to
the local language. Or just keep a copy on the School Servers much more
expansive content Library.

2) Include, in bold type, in the flyer that ships with the machine, the
> URL of the wiki basic manual.


I would like to work to make the default homepage for Browse more powerful.
Possibly with a link to various documents, like Support.


>  Maybe it's there somewhere, but I, for
> one, was way too excited to see it, and only found the wiki later,
> almost by accident.  That's also why I didn't realize that it was
> intended to be the main manual, rather than just one of many possible
> attempts.


Yup, the Manual and Getting Started pages are getting worked on by the hour.
I imagine the look of it a month from now will be much more refined. More
prominent advertisement of them will go a long way in getting feedback for
further improvements.



>  (See above about many choices being confusing ... ;-) )  (The
> big problem with a purely web-based manual is that you have to get on
> the web first.  So that info should *also* be included in the printed
> materials with the machine ... including the instructions for
> WPA-secured wireless until a newer build solves that problem.)


Good point!

This is why some developer utilities may be included when they otherwise
wouldn't: connectivity.  It makes sense to have tcpdump (a  command line
program used to inspect each network packet that is sent to the laptop)
installed to help troubleshoot network problems, but it doesn't neccesarily
make the same sense to include ltrace*, a library call tracker. Such a
utility is easily installed with yum and would be taking up valuable space
on the flash drive on the vast majority of machines.

*chosen arbitrarily

-- 
Michael Burns * Student
Open Source {Education} Lab
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