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The Linux Documentation Project Turns 10
"Today, TLDP is one of the largest Internet projects, where a few hundred people have written several hundred documents, ranging from small manual pages to in-depth guides that span over a hundred pages. The documentation covers nearly all aspects of Linux and is freely distributed, like Open Source software itself. In fact, many Linux distributions include the complete TLDP collection with the installation, helping both newcomers and more experienced users.
TLDP is fully multi-lingual. People volunteer their time to help with tools, reviews, translation, publishing and updates. This all requires work, and a core group of a few dozen aid the authors through a series of mailing lists. In addition, TLDP is pleased to acknowledge support from numerous companies over the years, including Red Hat and IBM.
TLDP continues to grow, in numbers of documents, supported languages and also new services, to better help an ever-increasing audience. To achieve this, TLDP is always looking for new volunteers to join, ranging from authors to programmers, to reviewers.
For more information, please visit http://www.tldp.org and read the LDP FAQ."
I remember using the early HOWTOs to compile my first Linux kernel (back in the days when your distro didn't come with a one-size-fits-all), setup my first PPP connection for my 14.4 Internet connection.
Many thanks to all those who have contributed over the years. The community is in your debt.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Not all of us are amazingly inclined when it comes to batting around in Linux. I just revived an old machine and gave RedHat a try... with no local Linux guru, these things are all I have to go on. No idea what I would do without these people putting their hearts into the documentation effort.
Auto-reply to ACs: "Truly, you have a dizzying intellect."
The projects so good that publishers just publish HOWTO's verbatim ocassionally, for print.
What we need is a user friendly "linux documentation" that uses X. It should allow complete customization of everything that is normally done at the command line. Man pages aren't near user friendly enough - they are way too technical. General help, examples, common options, FAQs, and advanced options for each topic would be ideal. Or, if the person doesn't like the command line, they could do it with the central linux configuration UI. It shouldn't be a limited subset specific to each distribution, it should be centralized. The LDP would be a good place for much of the help information, but more 'dummed down' versions would also be necessary.
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The Zingler
As a couple of counter-examples: MSDN and Knowledge Base.
However, since it's "M$", you refuse to even look and discover that, hey, their documentation is actually pretty damn good.
So on the 10th anniversary of the LDP (and congratulations, that's quite a feat) I say "up-yours" to blindly irrational sheep-morons.
evil adrian
However, since it's "M$", you refuse to even look and discover that, hey, their documentation is actually pretty damn good.
The documentation might be. But the community support (in my experience -- mod me down if you want) sucks. In my time, I've posted several questions to the MS newsgroups (mainly about Terminal Services). Similar questions for Linux would have received several replies (ranging from RTFM to a step by step instruction of what I needed to do) within a few minutes. Days later, I had no answer from anyone (MS or otherwise) as to if what I needed to do was even possible or not! And my question was hardly all that complicated... "Is there a way to log the IP address of PCs connecting to the Terminal Server without using third-party software?" Even google couldn't find the answer for me.
Given the choice, I'd take Linux and it's community anyday over MS's community or "paid" support. Unfortunately, I don't have that choice, because of MSs monopoly.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
First of all, I'd like to debunk the idea that, "there was a general consensus that Unix in general, and Linux in particular, lacked good documentation." That's BS--Unix has had good and even definitive documentation for decades. Four feet of manuals (man pages, install guides, networking config, X programming, etc., etc., etc.) were considered absolutely essential material back in the day, and they were generally really good! Today we have docs.(vendor).com, as a pretty damned fine replacement. At no point in recent history has the Unix community suffered from a general shortage of good documentation.
Now the LDP has come a long way in the last ten years, and let me join with everyone here in saying, "Congratulations! Linux wouldn't have gotten anywhere near where it is without you."
That said, there are two fundamental weaknesses that stem from the nature of the LDP, and I'd like to see some way of modifying the project to address them as much as possible.
First of all is the lack of a formal review process. As I understand it, anyone can submit a doc, and it will by accepted if it meets basic criteria. (mostly proper SGML/Docbook formatting.)
There really needs to be a review process, similar to code review for proper software projects. (of course, a project should also have a documentation writer/maintainer, which would invalidate much of the LDP, but I digress...) I have seen HOWTOs which were unintelligible, incomplete, unmaintained, and wildly inaccurate. Without grammar and technical review, stuff like this just keeps popping up at random.
The second problem is something that the LDP cannot (and shouldn't have to) correct on its own. It's incomplete--it is not a complete repository of Linux documentation, by any stretch of the imagination. To be fair, it shouldn't have to be--software should come with documentation! Howtos and guides should be supplements to that documentation, not the only source for it. Unfortunately, freelance developers don't always see things that way.
Anyways, enough sour grapes. Happy Birthday LDP! Keep on going, and keep on gettting better.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
On a serious note, I admit that Gentoo is the most well maintained distribution out there, and has the best free support when you consider the forums. However, I find a lot of Gentoo zealots feel like they're more in control of their system because of Gentoo. Control is a function of knowledge, not end user tools.
... but I'm sure in the not so distant future something even cooler, from some other quadrant, will come along and surpass it.
... others in the list, particularly those with strong partisan feelings toward another distribution, would probably argue the former. For me, personally, it is irrelevant, and while I do not go around telling everyone they should run Gentoo (a Knoppix Live CD is a far better thing to give a newbie than a Gentoo Live CD, for obvious reasons ... indeed, it is often a better rescue CD for Gentoo systems than a Gentoo LiveCD is), I am certainly not one to apologize for recommending it when I think it will solve someone's problems.
One of Gentoo's real strenths is that it provides the tools that take the tedium out of dependency resolution and compilation (a form of *BSD 'ports' on steroids), without obfuscating the underlying *NIX configurations and filesystem organization. This allows relative newcomers to learn how to setup a GNU/Linux system step by step, understand its organization and how it all fits together, without getting lost in the quagmire of learning the intricacies of autoconf, make, gcc, python or perl scripting.
People who are in to such things tend to become quite ecstatic when they discover such a platform, and such an implimentation. The rest of us, who like to just get work done with a minimum of fuss, may or may not find it appealing. I personally find it to be the best distro I've used by far (and I've been using Linux since the days before distros of any kind even existed...before X even ran on it)
People that use Gentoo and know Linux are cool. They don't run around the internet telling everyone about Gentoo, either. There is another type of Gentoo user...I'm honestly very sick of gentoo zealots throwing plugs in completely unrelated topics.
Well, as with any project, there are those few who are rabidly zealous and seem to have an overdeveloped evangelical streak. Debian, Mandrake, and others have had their fair share of overzealous enthusiasts as well (as does Mac OS X and, I fear, Windows...though one never knows how many of the latter aren't simply bought and paid for, at sub-industry wages and without medical benefits, no doubt).
I am glad, however, that they are evangelizing a Linux distro rather than a real-world religious cult a la $cientology or Mormonism. That having been said, it is natural for people who discover something new that really, really rocks in their mind to want to tell others, particularly if they think it might help someone who is having trouble.
An example where I was guilty of this was with 'transcode', a swiss-army knife tool for converting between various audio and video formats, backing up DVDs, and even authoring one's own DVDs from home video footage. It is a bear to compile, having done so myself under Mandrake, Debian, and others. Someone was having an inordinant amount of trouble getting the thing to work under Mandrake (the binaries didn't work properly, and the source dependencies are, well, hellacious to put it mildly). Having been down that road myself under both Debian and Mandrake, and having found it incredibly easy to install under Gentoo, I suggested that the user might want to try out Gentoo as an alternative. He did, got the thing installed with no trouble, and was greatful.
The question is, was that an off-topic bit of gentoo zealotry, or an ontopic suggestion to someone having trouble getting a notoriously difficult-to-install package running? The person I replied to would argue the latter
No distro can claim the fact that it has indirectly made thousands of users cringe
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
TLDP is a great thing, but there are definitely some weak areas -- specifically, HOWTO's that cover rapidly changing technologies. Topics like wireless, ACPI, X11 fonts, etc. become out of date quickly enough to make the HOWTO's nearly useless. Too often I end up having to Google newsgroups and random sites for hours or even dig through code to find the answers I need. There needs to be a reliable but very easy means of developer-contributed documentation in these cases.
Ten years later, it is no exaggeration to say this issue has been dealt with thoroughly.
No it hasn't. Linux documentation still sucks. Most of the stuff on LDP is outdated or irrelevant, and there's no cohesive guide to dealing with a system because any linux installation is made up of a ton of little parts from different projects that keep changing.
For the difficult tasks (ex: showing how LVM works and how to implement it across a RAID array) you'll just have to slog through the hard parts from concepts through implementation to understand why you want to do it in the first place and what your specfic goals are. With dificult tasks, there usually isn't a one-size-fits-all result everyone wants so you need to know the details or it just won't work well.
For trivial tasks, there typically is one good way to do it, and there will always be novices. For them, 'Mr. Video' is the way to go.
This is one thing I'd *love* to do for either OpenOffice or Mozilla/Firebird. Not to show all possible uses of those programs -- they can be complex at the edges -- but to show the basics quickly, plus a few important specifics ('tabbed browsing is valuable...let's see how'). Some of the existing tutorials for OpenOffice are quite good and within minutes can show a novice how to use the program. What is needed are more of the 'move the mouse this way and press this button to turn the text into a BOLD font'; teach the very basic basics to a stone cold novice.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.