[Doc] Intro

[Ot Ratsaphong]

Hi There,
I have just joined the list and would just like to introduce myself. I 
have just installed DesktopBSD 1.0 RC2 on Saturday and am quite 
impressed with the ease of installation. I come from a background in 
Windows and Gentoo Linux, and have tried FreeBSD for a short period 
while I was just checking it out. I was quite impressed by its stability 
and simplicity (compared to Linux). I was also impressed with FreeBSD 
documentation.

My programming backround is in C. Didn't quite get into C++. My favorite 
language is Ruby and am in the process of learning C#.

My personal goal is to develop a little utility that will get the latest 
stock data from Yahoo!Finance and email me the latest stock prices while 
I'm at work, so that I can trade them.

 From a documentation point of vue, I would like to help with User level 
documentation where I can. It will be a good learning experience for me.

The trouble with documentation is where do you start and where do you 
end? What is the scope of documentation of DesktopBSD?

What is the target audience? Being desktop oriented suggests that the 
audience would  be desktop users.

How are we going to approach this task? Excuse me if I sound like I'm 
ranting. This is just a quick brain dump of the all the issues that I 
can think of while the thoughts are there, and they might not be there 
for long :)

First impressions (view from outside):
DesktopBSD is made up of:
  - KDE Apps
  - KDE desktop enviroment (excuse the redundancy)
  - GNU utilities
  - DesktopBSD specific utilities
  - FreeBSD

What are we aiming to document?
  - KDE Apps usually comes with their own documentation (quality varies)
  - KDE has its own quite often excellent documentation
  - GNU utilities have their man pages
  - DesktopBSD specific utilities - This area needs documentation
  - FreeBSD has lots of good documentation

Another approach is to take a Use case apporach and create How-to 
documents for various things that desktop users want to do.

This is all I can think of at the moment and would like to hear what 
ideas or thoughts others have.

BTW while writing this message, I went across to the KDE documentation 
website and found some good dcoc on Ruby and QtRuby and Korundum, so I'l 
be exploring that for the next few days :)

Regards.