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Mad Penguin Launches Slackware Handbook Project
An anonymous reader writes "Mad Penguin's Adam Doxtater and Narayan Newton have launched a community-driven site dedicated to bringing the power and depth of the FreeBSD Handbook to Slackware Linux users. The site allows for the community to create and edit its own content. A simple voting system is in place to make sure the content that makes it into the handbook is of the highest quality. This is something that has been needed for some time and the idea of being able to edit our own material is really nice. A very unique project. Read the press release at LinuxPR.com."
Unique means "original". Not "Wiki with a moderation system similar to Slashdots".
I like muppets.
...to keep content of high quality. Now where have I seen something like that?
why wasn't it in the main article?
http://www.slackersbible.org/
btw. first post
There is already an ongoing project updating the official slackware book at http://slackbook.lizella.net/. For the most part, this work provides most information about daily admin tasks that anyone would need. Why is there this new project, then?
It's good to see that Gentoo's in-depth handbook is starting to catch on with other Linux distributions (not to say they didn't borrow the idea from somewhere else).
It's an excellent way to document Linux instead of having to sift through a long README document or rtfm man pages.
...anything like mad gorillas launching bananas?
;-)
Just curious.
Let me be the first to wish them the best. I've been putting together a little "handbook" of my own (not nearly as ambitious as mimicking the excellent FreeBSD handbook, of which I own a hard copy incidently). Of course, anyone is free to contribute provided they license their writing under the GPL for inclusion. Basically it's a rewrite of the Slackware Linux Essentials book by Chris Lumens, Logan Johnson, and David Cantrell. You can find it here. I call it "The Unofficial Revised Slackware Book Project". Stop by and take a look, I think you'll enjoy it.
Props to these guys and their project, and I'd like to point out to them that can use anything at the above site provided they do so under the GPL.
Slackware, what else when it must be secure, stable, and easy?
So much so that well... they said it best.
Sigs? We don't need no stinking sigs!
Too many connections
Line #31 certainly has to go.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Mirror
dedicated to bringing the power and depth of the FreeBSD Handbook to Slackware Linux users
phew. for a moment there i thought they misspelled "death".
Jokes aside, what's so remarkable about documentation that everyone contributes that warrant s a news post? If I started a "all you need to know about open source" wiki and posted the link, would it be accepted? (if so, it's time to get some advertisers and start rehashing news)
This is a wonderful step for Slackware. The FreeBSD Handbook is an incredible reference and guide, and every OS should have something similar....
;)
But what of the 100+ other gnu/linux distributions out there? One of linux's greatest strengths (and weaknesses) is the insane number of distributions and the sometimes strikingly large differences between distros. This book will work for Slackware, and maybe help with a few of the slack-based distros... but probably won't be much help for fedora, gentoo, or the other distros.
But what do I know... I'm just a silly FreeBSD user, and this is only my two cents.
Best of luck w/ the slackware handbook!
/dev/random
The FreeBSD handbook rules. But there's also the FreeBSD Wiki: FreeBSD wiki Which certainly needs more members.
I love the FreeBSD Handbook, it's an amazing guide to help get the system up and running. I got FreeBSD 5.3 + X11 + Xorg + Gnome2 compilled and installed in less than 24 hours. (total work time was around 5-6 hours)
Something is either unique (if there is one of it) or not. Calling something "very unique" is bad style.
The meaning of unique is pretty simple, and I think this project accomplishes nique status by the following.
Mad penguin is almost certainly going to publish this as a book, and make sure things are organized. Looking at the main site (slackersbible.org) you can see they've already picked 4 catagories for articles.
This work will be unique by the organization of its community based content, even though moderation is done by a community. Think about everything2, the amount of useful content is enormus but you can't learn much because the organization is lacking.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
heh, on a more serious note, I think this would be a great thing to have. Slackware is a pain if you done have a clue, like me.
The site allows for the community to create and edit its own content. A simple voting system is in place to make sure the content that makes it into the handbook is of the highest quality. This is something that has been needed for some time and the idea of being able to edit our own material is really nice. A very unique project.
Actually, it's not unique.
The content mangement appears to be Drupal with a modified Marvin 2k theme.
Drupal has had these features forever.
Move along now.
Real programmers can write assembly code in any language. -- Larry Wall
RMS would be proud!
learn something from your elder masters. FreeBSD is the one true operating system; it starts with good documentation, but that's only the beginning. The original poster wasn't kidding -- The FreeBSD Handbook does rock, but it rocks beacuse FreeBSD is powerful, yet easy to use. Further, unlike Linux, which is being torn in various directions by its corporate overlords, FreeBSD just plods along the way we techies like it. So, please _do_ enjoy the FreeBSD handbook. But you might want to feel what its like to have a seriously solid OS supporting your system.
Someone set mysql to accept only 100 connections.....should be fine now
Or how about something like this
I started out writing some content, but then I noticed I started to recreate the man pages. At that point, I began to wonder.. why can't people just RTFM?
I do this for quite a few other pieces of work (the Gentoo handbook, PHP Documentation (in 21 languages, it looks spectacular in color), the Creating XPCOM book is even available in Plucker format, as well as many others.
These are not straight conversions, they require actual human eyes to look over them, test them, add navigation and other elements. For example, look at the Plucker version of the 9/11 Report that I did. I added a LOT of functionality that wasn't there in the original version. (I also put my pristine HTML source version online for anyone to read. You can see the additional features I've added in that copy).
I'll be making a lot more of my stealth works public soon.
When they're finished with the Slackware Handbook, I'd be more than happy to look it over, do the conversion, and provide it in a mobile format for our user community.
Unique means there's only ONE. That's what the 'yoon-' bit on the front does. 'Very unique' only undermines the meaning of the word as used. There are no 'moderate' uniquenesses, say comprising of two, three or four things. There's only one kind of unique, the unary kind. Uniqueness is unique! "See Usage Note at absolute... See Usage Note at infinite." [1]
[1] http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=unique
This is good news. Although Slackware has had some good documentation its often out of date by a few editions each time.
Also, this seems to be in another one of those no-pictures documentation formats, like DocBook.
What's wrong with this picture? Go to the computer section of any bookstore and try to find a book that has no drawings or screenshots.
the goal is to replicate the FreeBSD Handbook
As a longtime slackware user, and someone who has dabbled with FreeBSD, I sure hope you're kidding about this.
The *LAST* thing we need is instructions like this:
"If you have versions 4.2 or less do X, if you have version >4.2 do Y, otherwise do Z"
Seriously, there were once instructions like this in the FreeBSD handbook (for building a kernel, as a matter of fact). It got fixed after I complained about it, but please, please, PLEASE have someone whose first language is English proofread it for you.
which is quite a bit bigger then the Slackware Book
First, what you really mean is that it's bigger than the Slackware book, and second the size of something has absolutely no bearing on the quality of the writing.
The last thing we need is a bunch of docs written by people with Zero-Wing syndrome - all you'll do is convince people to go elsewhere.
They need a section for odd bugs that get encountered from time to time. For instance, I did a kernel upgrade on Slackware 10 to 2.6.7 using the mkinitrd instructions from Pat's mini how-to on a system with integrated i815 chipset video. Under the 2.4 kernel /dev/agpgart is working and happy, under 2.6.7 /dev/agpgart is missing and you have to recreate it every boot with "mknod /dev/agpgart c 10 175". Sure, you could go Googling for the info, but it would be nice for them to have a single location for the odd stuff that can happen from time to time.
Slackware rocks!