TLDP Weekly News

Issue Number : 10
Publication Date : 2003-07-01
Table of Contents
1. New documents
1.1. Fresh@LDP
1.2. Proposed new documents
1.3. Submitted for review
2. Updates
2.1. HOWTOs
3. Happenings in the LDP world
3.1. We need volunteers!
3.2. Lampadas and GFDD
3.3. Out of date HOWTOs
4. LDP History: the sequel
5. Feedback and Contributions

1. New documents

1.1. 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.

1.2. 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.

1.3. Submitted for review

2. Updates

2.1. HOWTOs

HOWTOs updated in the past two weeks are:

3. Happenings in the LDP world

3.1. 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 In an ever-changing environment, our documents become outdated tremendously fast: a one year old HOWTO is like pre-historic charcoal writing on stone.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 would be a good start. We look forward to hearing from you soon!

Note 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.

3.2. 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.

3.3. 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.

4. 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!

5. Feedback and Contributions

Please help us create this weekly newsletter. Seen a site putting in a story with a link to the LDP? Completed the translation of any HOWTO? Know of any articles about the LDP published in newspapers or magazines? You can update us by sending in links and information at .

LDP Weekly News is edited by Machtelt Garrels, Torsten Schlabach and Y Giridhar Appaji Nag with help from several other people.