Why Linux needs help

Miguel de Icaza, the coordinator of the GNOME project, heaves a sigh when asked about "help."

"We have many problems with that," says the 26-year-old Icaza, who splits his time between hacking on GNOME and maintaining the computer network at a nuclear science research institute at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma in Mexico City. "It is being slowly fixed, very slowly."

Linux has a long history of help problems, going all the way back to the moment of its creation. Linus Torvalds is quite frank: He is utterly uninterested in the documentation process. Back in 1991, Torvalds wanted a version of Unix that he could run on his 386 PC. To use open source evangelist Eric Raymond's terminology, that was the "itch" Torvalds needed to "scratch." And scratch it he did, by hacking together the Linux kernel -- the all-important body of code at the heart of the operating system.

Torvalds made the code available to anyone who wanted it, but saw little need to hold hands when it came to actually installing the kernel. As a result, running early versions of Linux required true determination.

Matt Welsh, a graduate student in computer science at the University of California at Berkeley who specializes in "Internet-scale systems architecture," remembers his first encounter with Linux, in 1992, all too clearly.

"This was when Linux fit onto two floppy disks," recalls Welsh. "There was no networking, there was no X-windows [an essential graphical interface for Unix systems] -- it was a text-only system that didn't do very much. And it was impossible to figure out how to install it, given the scant 'readme' files that were available."

The only help Welsh could find was a document that consisted of little more than a snapshot of the file and directory structure of a working Linux file system. Using that snapshot as a guide, Welsh was forced to "manually" place each file in an appropriate directory, one at a time.

There had to be a better way -- and Welsh provided one, in true hacker fashion. After taking "copious notes" while installing that early version of Linux, he ended up with a document that eventually became the "Linux Installation HowTo." Over the next few years, under Welsh's coordination, the Linux HowTo archive grew to be an impressive library of helpful documents, each aimed at solving a specific problem -- such as connecting to the Internet, or setting up a firewall, or running Quake on a Linux system.

At first glance, Welsh's experience would appear to contradict the theory that hackers aren't interested in help.

"I pretty much took over most of the documentation and information management for the Linux project over the next couple of years, because I was scratching my own personal itch," says Welsh. "It wasn't like I was a guru and sitting there and going, oh, this is easy stuff and I'm just going to explain how it works. I would go and figure out how to do something and then write it up ... Even though it is not seemingly as glamorous, maintaining the documentation for a project like Linux was actually a lot of fun."

The Linux HowTo archive is a terrific resource, with answers to a great many questions. Along with the other available sources of information about Linux and Unix -- the "man" and "info" pages accessible instantly from the command line prompt, the proliferating online user guides and frequently-asked-question files -- it offers the determined Linux newbie a wealth of useful information.

But it doesn't do a darned thing for the stupid user.

I know, because my own computer skills are such that I am supremely qualified to impersonate an ignorant Unix/Linux user. Recently, courtesy of Linux hardware vendor VA Research, I obtained for review purposes a state-of-the-art Linux box with the GNOME desktop preinstalled. I decided that my first goal would be to see if I could use the GNOME-ppp utility to connect to the Internet over my home phone line without having to resort to typing in text commands at a command line prompt. (My review of GNOME's competitor KDE, as of last June, is here.)

I entered the basic info required -- phone number, user name, password, DNS number. Then I tried to connect. No go. Next, I clicked on the help menu. But all that lay under the help menu was an "About this program" option -- no help at all.

After a review of various other sources of information, including the Linux-PPP HowTo, some actual printed Linux books and even the ppp "man" pages, it became clear that I would not be able to avoid getting into a text editor and mucking about with the actual ppp configuration files.

GNOME is an impressive achievement, and by any reasonable standard of software progress both it and KDE are moving forward at a respectable clip. But they are both still a long, long way from being stupid-user friendly.

Next Page: Signs that help may be on the way

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