You have been eaten by a grue

Thu 18th Feb

I previously blogged about the training for Ubuntu available from Canonical. Today I went through the sample chapters – which incidentally is insanely hard to find. I was told the training was available in the Canonical store. I happened to know the url for the store so went direct to shop.canonical.com but if I’d googled for ‘canonical store‘, ‘ubuntu store‘, ‘canonical shop‘ or ‘ubuntu shop‘ I would have found it okay. But the path to get to the training samples is like a bad adventure game with only the exact convoluted path taking you to the prize:-

http://shop.canonical.com/ -> Click “Training”
http://shop.canonical.com/index.php?cPath=21 -> Click “Online Ubuntu Desktop Training”
http://shop.canonical.com/product_info.php?products_id=134 – Click “Ubuntu Online Training page”
http://www.ubuntu.com/training/e-learning – > Click “Check out two lessons for free – click here (registration required)”
http://training.canonical.com/enrol/oscommerce/actions.php?action=proceed_to_shop&trial_action=1&id=2

This took me to the launchpad login where I used my launchpad login to gain access. Of course if my mum is going to be doing this she will need a launchpad account of her own. The next page had the following text “You have successfully enrolled on the introductory taster of the Ubuntu Desktop Training (Elearning) course. This means you can access two out of the ten lessons of the course. To access the complete course, please consider purchasing the full version in our store. To enter the course, please click the Continue button below.” so I clicked “Continue”. Next I get “Ubuntu Desktop Training has been designed in a modular manner. Ten lessons in total will provide you with all the information required to get up and running with Ubuntu, as quickly as possible. You can go through the same lessons as many times as you like, or skip those which are less relevant.” and some more details including the requirement for Adobe Flash.

Surprisingly it says:-

“Follow the next three steps to get started:
1. Cancel any pop-up blocks; the course can not load without this!
2. If you don’t already have a Flash player installed, download one of the following plugins: Flash (choose: tar.gz if running Ubuntu) or Gnash (available soon) then:
3. Click ‘Enter Course’ to proceed and enjoy!“

I’m somewhat surprised (and a little alarmed) that we’re telling people to grab a tarball from Adobe rather than use the package manager to install Flash. Of course ideally we shouldn’t use Adobe Flash for this at all, but that’s a completely separate argument.

Finally I click “Enter Introductory Taster”.

Well, I say ‘finally’, in fact my browser blocks the popup and I get yet another page to click a link to “« Click here to open the course »” with the tip “(you may need to turn off pop-up blocking for this website)” in small text.

This whole process is insane and needs to be made easier to find and get into. My mum would have given up long ago and gone off to make a cake or something more productive. Not requiring Launchpad for the logon would be a start, and making a link directly from the store to the sample training material would also help.

Getting access aside, the course is presented in a pop-up window containing a flash based application. The window is resizable up and down, and the content scales well which is helpful given my Mum has a fairly low resolution screen at the moment.

The free sections are ‘Introducing Ubuntu’ and ‘Exploring the Ubuntu Desktop’ with a short ‘Course Introduction’ which explains the way the course works. As I mentioned previously the course is based on Ubuntu 7.10, but is being updated for 10.04 right now.

The available sections seemed to be paced well with clear diagrams and easy to understand narration. The interface is straightforward with simple navigation options for ‘home’, ‘back’, and ‘next’ at the bottom of the screen, and ‘help’, ‘glossary’ and ‘exit’ at the top. A slider along the bottom shows how far through the current lesson you are, and a page count below that shows how far through the course you are.

As this was only an introductory taster I couldn’t tell if the whole course would be suitable, but given the rest of the subject, it seems to fit with what I expect Mum will want out of the computer. The rest of the chapters are ‘Using the Internet’, ‘Using OpenOffice Applications’, ‘Ubuntu and Games’, ‘Customising the Desktop and Applications’, ‘Making the Most of Images and Photos’, ‘Playing Music and Videos’, ‘Ubuntu Help and Support’ and finally ‘Partitioning and Booting’. Much of that will be useful to Mum, I’m sure. Some less so – I don’t think she’ll be doing much in the way of disk partitioning, but you never know, from small acorns do mighty something something..

I look forward to evaluating the 10.04 version of the course, and will in all likelyhood set this up for Mum as it will cover a lot of ground that I wouldn’t have time to do well. In fact I’ve already set her up with a Launchpad account which will help not only with this training but will also allow her to buy music online, share files, sync notes, file bugs (hah!), ask technical questions and whatever else Canonical add to Ubuntu One in the future.