2004
13
The Linux Documentation Project
2004-03-31
The Linux Documentation Project Weekly News
Documents submitted for review
Gerardo Arnaez, Walt Pennington and Werner Heuser are the authors of the Medicine HOWTO. And no, this does not tell you where to purchase the cheapest <insert your favorite spam ad for medicine here > ;-) Rather, it is a collection of links to important Linux and Open Source sites for doctors and other medical personnel. The HOWTO also discusses the recording, storage, retrieval, exchange and display of medical data, has pointers to mailinglists, information for veterinarians and discussions of various applications, including medical records and imaging applications.
New document proposals
Haowen Zhang browsed our collection and other resources looking for information about the internals of System V Init. Because he couldn't find what he was looking for, he asked whether it would be useful to have a System V Init HOWTO. There has not been a substantial proposal for the content yet, so if you think this might be interesting, join us on the
discuss mailinglist discuss@en.tldp.org.
Even though Eric Raymond posted an open letter to Sun, arguing in favour of the release of the Java source code, Scott McNealy said that this won't happen any time soon. Jon Fox, who was working on an Enterprise Java document, has moral objections after hearing about this and fears he's wasting time and energy documenting a non-free platform. He therefore stops working on the Enterprise Java document.
Updated HOWTOs, FAQs and Guides
Floris Lambrechts sent in v0.8 of the User Authentication HOWTO. This HOWTO explains how user and group information is stored and used with PAM, the Pluggable Authentication Modules. The update contains language changes and small bug fixes.
Choose a meaningful subject!
Dear Authors and other users of the submission mailinglist,
As you may have notices, the submission mailinglist is an open list and thus a target for spammers. For your submissions to stand out, choose a sensible, meaningful subject when posting updates. Include the name of your HOWTO, Guide or FAQ in the subject. Otherwise it might pass unnoticed!
News in The LDP world
Linux Brochure Project to join TLDP:
Barbara Irwin of the Linux Brochure Project (LBP) indicated that
Guylhem Aznar invited LBP to join the LDP
Initially, the project developed as a way for printing a flyer for
the Victoria Linux User Group. LBP is a registered project at SourceForge. Various examples for US Letter and A4 paper sizes are available.
Greg Ferguson had questions about what Guylhem had in mind and
wanted to know the areas
of cooperation between the two projects, upon which Barbara
explained that the LBP will become a part of TLDP and that LDP can act
as a repository for completed/processed brochures.
Errata: Interview with Fred Stutzman:
Because of problems with the conversion of the TLDP Weekly News source XML to RSS feed, the interview with Fred Stutzman last week was not spread through our RSS feed.
If you've missed this or any other interview, discussion topic or
news item, don't despair. You can always catch up on TLDP Weekly News issues
and the latest versions by browsing through our archives.
Discussions on TLDP lists
Second TLDP CD-ROM distro:
Bradley Glonka reminded us of the fact that his offer to bring out
a TLDP CD-ROM still stands. He proposed to publish on demand through LinuxCentral, who are also hosting a TLDP mirror, and donate part of the revenue to TLDP. However, Greg argued that there is no need for a second CD provider and advises that TLDP sticks to the CD offered by Embedded Logic Systems.
De gustibus et coloribus non disputandum:
The Romans knew it already 2000 years ago: don't discuss colour nor taste. The discussion about a possible new style for TLDP continues. While author input about their favorite colours is being waved away with the remark that DocBook enables authors to concentrate on content, they should not worry about formatting and display
, some are concerned about how their documents will look, especially if an average
colour is chosen. As David Horton suggests, the only way out of this thread might well be to concentrate on how a document look in plain black-and-white.
HOWTO contribute to TLDP
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The LDP Weekly News is compiled and edited by Machtelt Garrels and
Y Giridhar Appaji Nag with help from several other people.