Self-Introduction: Stanton Finley

[Stanton Finley]

On Tue, 2005-08-16 at 07:25 -0400, Paul W. Frields wrote:
> On Mon, 2005-08-15 at 22:26 -0600, Stanton Finley wrote:
> > Stanton Max Finley 
> >       * Company: The Malt-O-Meal Company
> 
> No way!  My wife and I are so totally into your cereal, it's insane.
> Seriously Stanton, welcome to the project.  Do you have one or more
> subjects you would be interested in writing on?  We are in need of
> tutorials to accomplish common user and sysadmin tasks, so please pitch
> in with your ideas.  Also check out the Wiki if you haven't:
> 
>   http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/DocsProject
> 
> ...especially the checklist for new contributors.  Welcome on board.
> 
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Thanks for your kind welcome Paul.

I must admit being a bit overwhelmed trying to find some direction among
the maze of links from the wiki about the docs to bugzilla about the
docs to docs about the docs and the docs themselves. I'm sure that this
initial confusion will clarify itself in my mind as I assimilate the
structure and logical process from which this project has evolved and is
evolving.

As is the case I'm sure for millions of potential Fedora users I
approached Linux from the Microsoft milieu. My initial question was
"where's the manual"? This naivety was soon replaced with paradigm
shifting realization that there is no (single) manual and that one must
rely upon the community.

The frustration that led to my own writings (most recently at
http://stanton-finley.net/fedora_core_4_installation_notes.html)
continues to motivate my desire to see the emergence of a body of Fedora
documentation that is parallel in quality to the OS itself. Fedora Core
is the class act of today's Linux OS distributions and its documentation
should be nothing less.

I appreciate that the formal body of Fedora documentation must conform
to the founding philosophy to "build a complete, general purpose
operating system exclusively from open source software". My current
quandary is that like most real-world Fedora users I actually do not use
exclusively free and open-source software on my Fedora box. I play
patent-encumbered MP3s and watch videos which use proprietary codecs. I
have RealPlayer and Sun Java installed and use the nVidia driver for
graphics acceleration.

So how do we create the documentation which the "real-world" user is
actually clamoring for? How do we accommodate and reconcile the free
software model with the need for a single-source all encompassing Fedora
Core "manual" in which the user can find the answer to his
fedoraforum.org style questions. How do I play MP3s on Fedora? How to I
watch the movie trailers at http://www.apple.com/trailers/ on Fedora?
How do I install Azureus for bittorrent on Fedora and configure it to
use the Sun Java JRE?

I dual boot Microsoft Windows XP and Fedora Core 4 on my home computer.
Having purchased Windows and Windows software I already bought the
licenses to listen to MP3s and watch divX encoded movies. So why can I
not turn to a subset of Fedora Docs that tells me how to use these on my
Fedora installation with the disclaimer that this documentation is
written "for parties who own or believe they own licenses for such
software". It is actually this kind of documentation which I would like
to contribute. I believe that until Fedora can provide this class of
documentation for it's potential users its user base will be constricted
and compromised as other Linux based OSs find ways of circumventing the
patent-encumbered and non-open-source issues in their user
documentation.