Friday 30th June 2006
freenx on dapper
(or how I learned to stop worrying and trust my instincts)
I use wikis a fair amount nowadays, and I get used to just being able to update things that are wrong. Unfortunately, a lot of info on the web is still in forums and suchlike, which aren’t quite suited to collaborative documentation. For that, we still have to rely on many people writing their own documentation, and let google filter out the right one.
For instance, I was trying to install freenx on ubuntu dapper today. This thread seems to be widely acknowledged as the definitive guide to setting it up, but it just smelled a bit to complicated to me. A bit more hunting around, and I found this guide, which is a lot more straightforward (and just as importantly, worked fine). But even then, it’s not quite right – the URL for the repository seems suspiciously unofficial. So I found this list of mirrors, which is on a wiki, but isn’t part of any install guide.
Don’t underestimate how hard it is to write good documentation – it needs to be minimalistic as well as comprehensive. But today’s lesson is that if something seems more complicated than it needs to be, it probably is. Oh, and I wish freenx was in dapper by default, but I’m not sure that anyone is working on it.