Hi folks!
I wanted to bring you up to speed about the recent activities on the Slackware Documentation Project and provide you with some statistics.
The Slackware Documentation Project is now active for exactly 2 months. I think we are a lucky bunch that we were given the opportunity to use a hostname in the slackware.com domain – thanks Pat!.And thanks to the anonymous benefactor who pays for server hosting and bandwidth – I could not do this without you.
I want to thank everyone who participated in the LinuxQuestions.org thread which inspired the birth of the project – http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/slackware-documentation-project-4175422561/ is now a sticky thread on the Slackware forum. I want to thank the people who stepped up in the early stages of the project, to volunteer as staff editors, and I particularly want to thank all of you who are creating the content in this Wiki. If we want to find ourselves “a place in history” we need inspired writers.
We have some great HOWTO’s currently and it is rewarding to watch the discussions on the (sic) discussion pages which help the continuous improvement of the articles.
I am very excited by the work that is being done to translate the english pages into a variety of other languages. I don’t think I ever saw a Slackware related site which had pages available in 12 different languages! Thanks to all who care enough to do the hard work of translating and thus enabling whole new communities to get familiar with Slackware Linux.
Matthew Fillpot completed the huge task of running the complete Slackware Essentials Book (http://slackbook.org/beta/) through a DocBook parser which he wrote himself, creating a Wiki version of the Book which is now an integral part of our site. Thanks to Alan Hicks for changing the new Book’s license and thereby allowing us to create a derived work. Any updates to the Book’s content will be fed back into the original of course.
We revamped the front page of the Wiki. It is the page which most visitors will open first. Therefore it should be clean, concise, and show relevant information. We decided to highlight the information which is the most dynamic – your contributions! The HOWTOs pages are now clearly outlined on the homepage, and there is also a shortlist of recent changes to the existing articles, an invitation to click through.
We currently have 180 registered user accounts in the Wiki and 101 people subscribed to the slackdocs mailing list http://lists.alienbase.nl/mailman/listinfo/slackdocs . All in all pretty impressive numbers for such a young project. The Wiki has some public statistics at http://docs.slackware.com/slackdocs:stats and some non-public statistics pages of which I made a PDF print.
We are barely starting… and I would like to see the volume of information grow steadily. How will we achieve that? Well; I would like all of you to go through your private notes. If you know of something that you struggled with, found the solution for and wrote down so that you would not forget – that is exactly the type of information we would like you to add to the Wiki ! Also, you may be a member of a local LUG in your area. Drop the word on the Slackware Documentation Project! And what about your mail closing signature, or discussion forum signature?
Perhaps you can add a link to the SlackDocs Wiki there. Spreading the word about the project, is what will give it the momentum to make it grow bigger.
Thanks for listening.
Eric
Great!…
I’ll look forward to translate some content to spanish ( if there is any left ….)
Huge pat on the shoulder for all the work, Eric. Updating the NIS+NFS-HOWTO for 14.0 is on my TODO list, as well as another article about installing Slackware on a root server that doesn’t officially sport the distribution in the first place. It’s nice to see this mosaic grow piece by piece.
This would have not been possibe without great leadership fro you an the rest of the admins team. Thanks for you work Eric!
About the LUG thing. I stopped going to LUGs ages ago as every time I mentioned Slackware I would get tons of abuse.
Ottavio, I’m curious what king of abuse were you getting. Perhaps you meant ridicule? In my country I’ve got various kinds of reactions after telling someone that I’m using Slackware, from “isn’t Slackware for servers?” to some fond memories of using it in the past. So far I haven’t been ridiculed for begin a slacker, although people often have typical misconceptions about packaging (dependencies particularly) in Slackware.
Hey Eric, I couldn’t find any doc about BFS+BFQ.
Do you have any experience with that?
Thanks for python-cssselect Eric! Calibre stopped fetching and sending news via wifi to my kindle without it. Installing your new build fixed it.
Hi, I can’t see any page from table of contents, when I use konqueror with webkit mode. Khtml works perfect.
Hi y0g1
Do you mean http://docs.slackware.com/toc:start ? It looks perfectly fine here in konqueror in webkit mode. I am running KDE 4.9.2 here, I don’t know if that makes a difference. I have not updated Slackware’s kwebkitpart package so the webkit renderer I am using should be the same you are using.
Eric
Hi iZaK
I had to lookup “BFS+BFQ” because I have no idea what good it does.
Feel free to write an article about it in our Wiki if your knowledge of it is better than mine!
Eric
@Eric
toc:start looks perfectly fine. If You chose any topic from it, thet it is not displayed.
for ecxample http://docs.slackware.com/slackware:beginners_guide
I can read it with khtml, but not with webkit.
I use Your kde-4.9.2 compilation
Hi y0g1
That page loads perfectly fine here in konqueror with webkit when I open it from the ToC page… and other pages work similarly OK.
Eric
Thnx @eric for test.
I have to check my konqueror/kde setup. Maybe something is wrong.
The docs look great. I’m thinking of contributing a theme for dokuwiki if that’s something you guys would be interested in. I’ll also probably translate some content into Bosnian too. I know a few passionate slackers from Bosnia who might help out also.
Will spread the word, because the bird is the word. Great work!
Hi Armin
A theme is not something we are looking for right now 🙂 We are quite happy with the looks of the site as it is and want it to stay close to the look and feel of the slackware.com website.
Translations are always more than welcome. There is no Bosnian section yet and if you want to make a serious start, I will add it as one of the supported languages in the Wiki (so that it becomes visible in the language selection dropdown on the left)
Cheers, Eric