2003
10
The Linux Documentation Project
2003-07-01
TLDP Weekly News
New documents
Fresh@LDP
GNU Linux para usarios, a document introducing GNU Linux and the spirit of free software, in Spanish by Juan Rafael Fernández García. He brings this subject from the users' point of view, in this case, a group of school teachers. It is primarily a practical guide to help teachers in their everyday life as Linux users.
Daniel Nofftz's Athlon Powersaving HOWTO which explains how to enable the power-saving functionality of the Athlon/Duron/AthlonXP processor on some motherboards/chip-sets has been release.
Proposed new documents
Zbigniew Lisiecki proposed his RPC HOWTO, which is indeed a specific topic on which we don't have clear documents. Even the NFS HOWTO does not explain very clearly how RPC and the portmapper work.
Submitted for review
Simon Anderson is in the process of reviewing a document which he presents as the Linux Wireless Access Point HOWTO and requests your comments. It needs to be compared to the Wireless HOWTO and the Wireless Linksys WPC11 Mini-HOWTO.
We always like to see more women joining us, so make Emma Jane Hogbin feel at home. She submitted an ACPI HOWTO - ACPI being the next generation power management tool.
Saqib Ali converted his Apache-WebDAV-LDAP-HOWTO from SGML to XML.
Updates
HOWTOs
HOWTOs updated in the past two weeks are:
Miroslav Skoric updated his FBB Packet-radio BBS mini-HOWTO to v1.19.
And we received v2.2.6 of the DocBook-OpenJade-SGML-XML-HOWTO, by Saqib Ali.
Apache based WebDAV Server with LDAP and SSL by Saqib Ali updated to v4.0
Battery Powered Linux Mini-HOWTO has been updated to v2.3 by David Lechnyr
The Debian Jigdo mini-HOWTO by Peter Jay Salzman has been updated to v0.127
Ian Ward's Debian and Windows Shared Printing mini-HOWTO is now at v1.1
David A. Ranch updated his Linux IP Masquerade HOWTO to v2.00.062203
Al Dev (Alavoor Vasudevan) updated the Linux Kernel HOWTO to v6.1
Miroslav "Misko" Skoric's LILO mini-HOWTO is now at v3.11.
The Modem-HOWTO by David S. Lawyer is now at v0.28
Svetoslav Slavtchev's XFree Local Multi-User HOWTO is at v1.0.3
Mendel Leo Cooper sent in v1.9 of the Advanced Bash scripting Guide.
Miroslav "Misko" Skoric updated the FBB Packet-radio BBS mini-HOWTO to v1.20.
Happenings in the LDP world
We need volunteers!
That's about the conclusion of last week's
major thread
on the discuss mailing list. In an ever-changing environment, our documents
become outdated tremendously fast: a one year old HOWTO is like pre-historic
charcoal writing on stone. Apart from people with a technical background, we
also need user reviews to check on a document's usability. Not only will user
comments improve on readability; if more people read a HOWTO and comment on it,
it would be easier to make out which are just hype and which are useful for the
general public, as David Lawyer pointed out
in the discussion.
While on the subject, several means of getting more volunteers were
discussed. It was generally agreed that neither mailing the LUGS about every
review needed, nor advertising this in Slashdot would improve greatly on the
current situation. Indeed, one can hardly be forced to be a volunteer.
So let's just apply to your goodwill: make your skills known to us - even
if your only skill is that you speak English, and
join the LDP! In
my (Tille's) point of view, even if you can only do a little bit, you owe it to
the community, for being able to use such a good system. Joining the discuss
mailing list discuss-subscribe@en.tldp.org.NOSPAM would be a good start. We look forward to hearing from you soon!
Officially working for TLDP
Several governments, among which the European, can now subsidize your work
for TLDP. Check with your local representative.
As a side-effect, copyright laws came up in this lengthy discussion. Of course there's the law: in almost any country all writing is copyright, on any medium, and you need the author's permission to do anything with it. But since most authors are rather flattered to be quoted, remember that getting approval can be arranged in a convivial style.
Lampadas and GFDD
One of the topics that came up during the discussion about the progress of Lampadas was about the Gnutemberg Free Documentation Database. Gaetano Paolone, one of the main developers of GFDD, suggested that The LDP use GFDD engine. GFDD is written in PHP and uses PostgreSQL as dbms. It is licensed under the GNU GPL. The developers are working on an off-line import feature and changes on documents URI.
Out of date HOWTOs
Peter Jay Salzman got hebrew working on his system, and in the process found that there are some howto's which are so out of date that they've become completely useless and even worse, misleading at times. He tried reaching the maintainer of the hebrew howto and wanted to find out if there were any provisions for "hijacking" someone else's howto.
LDP History: the sequel
This is the continuation of the story started in TLDP WN 9, where we started digging into the past and got stuck in 1996.
After extended research in the dungeon server rooms of Google, we can state with almost-certainty that the mysterious Erik does have a last name after all. Most likely, we are dealing here with the Erik Troan, who supported virtually half of the Linux-using world in the 1993-1996 period and later on became the Senior Director of Engineering at RedHat.
Further research revealed that somewhere in 1996, Greg Hankins became supervisor of the LDP project. He was the original author of the Serial HOWTO, which he started in 1993 and maintained until 1997; he was also one of the main contributors to the SGML-tools development project.
By 1998, Guylhem Aznar was appointed coordinator of the LDP. The exact configuration of the core team in those days has been preserved. By then, it was composed of a hub consisting of one main coordinator, and individual FAQ, Guide and HOWTO coordinators, Greg Ferguson, Joshua Drake and Tim Bynum respectively. Furthermore, most translation efforts started in 1994 are now running more or less at full speed. The German translation effort was among the first. But you know (and refer to the Italians joining us recently), it can take a while before people find each other ;-)
It appears that this team registered the linuxdoc.org domain to which they moved the entire Linux documentation collection, which was of course promptly mirrored, and the relationship with the UNC was maintained. As far as we could find out, they also started the discuss and other mailing lists - until then, discussion primarily happened in the Usenet newsgroups
What happened in the LDP during the years just before the new millennium? Find out in July!
Feedback and Contributions
Please help us create this weekly newsletter. Seen a site putting
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feedback@en.tldp.org.
LDP Weekly News is edited by
Machtelt Garrels, Torsten Schlabach and Y Giridhar Appaji Nag
with help from several other people.