on Sat, Mar 26, 2005 at 12:37:01AM -0600, Brad Bendily (bendily@xxxxxxxxx) wrote:
> > So: I was wrong, the docs _are_ avaiable. However through Novell's
> > website, not SuSE's. And they take some digging to get to.
>
> Well, Novell does own SuSE so, i'm not sure how much the SuSE pages
> will be kept up.
Well, SuSE's a brand with a decade's worth of goodwill in it. Think of
it as Tide laundry detergent: the company's Proctor & Gambel, but the
_product_ is Tide. If I'm looking for information on SuSE, I'll turn to
the product pages first.
If you go to http://www.novell.com/documentation , SuSE's reduced to a
"category".
> I've used the www.novell.com/documentation plenty times before and
> they're usually almost helpful. At least pointing me in the right
> direction with the problem I have. Also, just a note, the support docs
> (most of them, at least the ones I looked at) are wiki based, when
> you're going through the html view. So if you have a fix or suggestion
> you can make it.
Could you post specific URLs?
Two reasons: most immediately, I know what you're talking about. Side
benefit: you're Google-juicing the useful stuff. Yet another problem
of Novell is that their own SuSE-related stuff is getting heavily washed
by either old pointers to dead pages, Novell's own reorgs of their
website, and/or not having had the pages up long enough to get
sufficient inbound links.
That said: most of the docs I found (on Novell's site, at any rate)
were PDF docs. Suitable for printing, but lousy for online reading.
E.g.:
http://www.novell.com/documentation/suse92/treetitl.html?nonav=true
> > Novell are strongly encouraged to provide direct doc support links off
> > their SuSE domain (suse.com, suse.de, etc.) pages. Streamlining their
> > corporate site wouldn't hurt either.
>
> Another support resource you can use is the support forums. Point your
> news reader to support-fourms.novell.com and you can get FREE help
> with any of their products.
Y'know....
Not to get 'snickety or anything -- or maybe I do -- but I hate
form-based web support. It's clunky to read, it's clunky to write.
Particularly if it's got registration. I'd rather RTFM, join a mailing
list, or hit Usenet. The Web is great for accessing content, but it's
not a particularly good way of generating it or searching through
list-type stuff. E.g.: if I find a mailing list archive, first thing
I'll look for is an mbox download which lets me put the whole thing on
my own box where I can sort, thread, and filter the content to my
liking, with my own toolset. Online forums are passable at best, but
horribly inconsistant as a rule, and really lack for good processing
tools.
> Also, have you looked at the SuSE mailing list? There is another FREE
> resource you can use to get your questions answered.
>
> http://lists.suse.com/
No. I have hit the IRC support channel. Despite what I wrote above,
lists are something I generally need an incentive to join -- my mail
feed is ginormous as it is. If I knew I was working with SuSE
significantly over a period of time, yes, I'd join.
> Although, looking at your homepage i'm sure you're aware of these things.
Yes ;-)
> To be honest, I don't blame these OS developer guys for not having
> documentation.
> At least of the non-comercial open source folks. They don't get any or
> much compensation for the work they do and every one wants details on
> how to use their product/project.
Um....
SuSE most decidedly *are* being paid, and are paying, to produce docs.
A few posts back to this list, the point I made was that the best docs
are with the projects that have the longest/largest community
orientation. E.g.: Debian. Newer community projects aren't as rich,
but are doing pretty well (Gentoo, Ubuntu). And some of the commercial
organizations with either a long or highly community-oriented basis (Red
Hat, Mandrake) also do well.
Peace.
--
Karsten M. Self <kmself@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> http://kmself.home.netcom.com/
What Part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
Linux Terminal Server Project: It's free. It works. Duh!
- http://www.ltsp.org/
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