Tips and Tricks site

paul138 · Guru Joined: 09 Aug 2002 Posts: 370 Location: Ottawa, ON

I am in the process of putting the finishing touches on a -low volume- site dealing with Gentoo Linux Tips and Tricks.

Please feel free to stop in and check the place out. There is not much content at the time, but that's where you come in :wink:

http://forkbomb.dhs.org/gtat/

Thanks.[/url]
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rojaro · l33t Joined: 06 May 2002 Posts: 732

hmm ... imho not a good idea. it would be better if you would contribute stuff like this to the official FAQ's or the Forums which will always contain MUCH MORE informations, tipps & tricks than you could ever provide with your own/independend website. contributing to the official documentation also means raising the quality of the official docs.

but, the idea of a book is generally pretty good, but not a book based on a blog. if you really intend to do a community based book you should do this via a more broadly established way - which means using standard formats like SGML and a CVS server with a webinterface.

right now your site is just another not-worth-to-be-visited-blog :(

but the basic idea of a gentoo book is actually pretty good, so you'll should think more about that idea and maybe ask your targeted audience for support, ideas and suggestions as there are surely lots more people (like me) which would be interessted in such and would help you with this. i know what a hard job it is to write a book - especially if you intend to do it for a broad audience (e.g. the gentoo users) so i'd suggest to concentrate more on just this one idea and do it in a more proffessional way ;)
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pizen · Posted: Wed Sep 25, 2002 6:46 pm Post subject:

Something for a book might be more in-depth discussion into the options during installation. Things like the pros and cons of the different crons and the different sys loggers. I use vcron because the install guide suggested I use it and I, like many others, would like to know why they suggested that one. Just some stuff to think about for your future Gentoo writing projects.

paul138 · Guru Joined: 09 Aug 2002 Posts: 370 Location: Ottawa, ON

pizen · Posted: Wed Sep 25, 2002 7:08 pm Post subject:

paul138 · Guru Joined: 09 Aug 2002 Posts: 370 Location: Ottawa, ON

rojaro · l33t Joined: 06 May 2002 Posts: 732

rojaro · l33t Joined: 06 May 2002 Posts: 732

Lowspirit · Posted: Thu Sep 26, 2002 2:18 am Post subject: Ehm?

Does this only go for tips'n'tricks sites or...? I agree the site is very rough around the edges and very content empty, but general idea behind it is good and I disagree with the :

rojaro · l33t Joined: 06 May 2002 Posts: 732

rac · Posted: Thu Sep 26, 2002 6:31 am Post subject:

Can anybody in here interested in participating in a project to create a better Gentoo documentation system please post a message to knowledge base: how-to documents via commandline?
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paul138 · Guru Joined: 09 Aug 2002 Posts: 370 Location: Ottawa, ON

Regardless of those who are against it and those who arent, I'm working on the site.

And thus with this site all documentation generated will be fed back to the Gentoo folks.

Cheers!
-Paul
_________________
Talk is cheap because supply always exceeds demand.

NickDaFish · Posted: Thu Sep 26, 2002 3:35 pm Post subject:

Wahoo! Water Pistols at dawn! :lol:

Gentoo can always do with more docs and I think paul138 is a dude for trying to supply some. However I do have to agree (though not as rabidly) with rajaro and others that there should be some sort of intergration with the current docs. Even if it's just a snapshot of his stuff that's put in the docs area. There is no point in fragmenting Gentoo's support into multiple sites. It should all come together in one place.
Having said that I realy don't care how paul138 compiles his docs, he can have a whiteboard in time square for all I care. It realy doesn't matter. If that works for him and the Gentoo community gets more docs out of it.... cool!

In short...
paul138... if your going to go to the trouble of making docs try and fit them in somehow with the current Gentoo setup. Maybe get a Gentoo.org host name and look into exporting your docs to the Gentoo XML format.
Everyone else... I see a lot of complaints about a lack of user participation, give paul138 a little support huh? So he want's to do things in his own way.... this isn't a Micro$oft forum here. I thought individuals were welcome.

Just one n00b's 2c.....

paul138 · Guru Joined: 09 Aug 2002 Posts: 370 Location: Ottawa, ON

Naan Yaar · Bodhisattva Joined: 27 Jun 2002 Posts: 1549

Any way you can "give back to the community" is laudable. Good luck with your efforts. If you can contribute to existing documentation frameworks like Gentoo/Forum FAQ, Gentoo docs., Forum Tips & Tricks, in addition to putting them on your website, it would be doubly good and potentially serve a wider audience.

masseya · Posted: Thu Sep 26, 2002 11:25 pm Post subject:

I would also like to encourage your feldgling help site. Everyone has to start somewhere. Looking forward to watching your site grow.

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telex4 · l33t Joined: 21 Sep 2002 Posts: 704 Location: Reading, UK

Well first of all, this project could be really good, so go for it! To whoever says its a redundant fork, does it matter? Any good docs can always go back into the main gentoo "tree" of docs anyway.

Now I started up, and wrote most of the docs, for http://www.newtolinux.org.uk which has been very well received by anyone whose ever beene sent there by those who run the site, those who send us comments and register on the forum. Yeah there are lots of sites for gnu/linux newbies, but our site offers something subtly different: a logical progression of tutorials that, once you've done them all, will give you a good understanding of your system, your shell, software installation etc. and plenty of knowledge and resources to go out there and find more. Because we offer something different, people appreciate the site. And even if it only helps 10 people, it's worth it (tho its getting a good 50k hits a month atm

)

Anyway, my point is this: if you can offer something even slightly different to that offered on the gentoo site, then its worth pursuing that. The best thing is to establish exactly what you are intending to offer that is different to the "competition", and really focus on that...

As a Gentoo newbie (on gentoo for, ooh, 2 days now, or 6 if you include set-up) one thing I'd like to see are simple howtos like "Getting started with cd burning" and "Setting up dialup" for Gentoo... yes there are plenty of docs out there about wvdial and pppd and cdrecord etc. etc. and many geeks love to say "RTFM" but there's nothing quite like working from a document written with you in mind, talking about your tools, your potential problems etc.

Anyway, yeah, go for it. I'm willing to help out a little if you want help

You can even link to my site (aheeheehee) or take & modify documents from it