docs December 2007

docs@lists.stg.fedoraproject.org

38 participants
73 discussions

Self-Introduction: Timothy Murphy
by Timothy Murphy 23 Dec '07

23 Dec '07

My name is Timothy Murphy. I am a retired mathematics lecturer at Trinity College Dublin (TCD) <http://www.maths.tcd.ie/> (although I still give courses, this year on Elliptic Curves: <http://www.maths.tcd.id/pub/Maths/Courseware/EllipticCurves>). I have a fairly precise idea of what I would like to do for the Fedora Documentation Project, namely to bring Miles Brennan's "Linux Home Server HOWTO" <http://www.brennan.id.au/> within the Fedora Documentation Project. I should say that this has Miles' blessing. The latest version of his HOWTO is based on Fedora Core 5, and Miles says he does not have time to bring it up to date, and would welcome someone else taking on the task. This HOWTO assumes that the reader is running Fedora, so it is entirely appropriate that it should be brought under the auspices of the Fedora Documentation Project. It seems to me that this HOWTO serves a growing need, as more and more of us become administrators of small home systems, with several laptops and perhaps a desktop shared among family members and friends. I don't think this HOWTO as it is requires many content changes, although I appreciate that the Fedora Documentation Project has fairly precise style and format requirements. I have been using Linux since it first came out, having been a Minix user before that. (I still find Andy Tanenbaum's refusal to bring Minix to the 386 difficult to comprehend.) Much earlier, I introduced the first Unix system in Ireland, Unix V6 on a pdp-11/23, in the School of Mathematics at TCD, in 1979. I was also a very early user of TeX. and wrote one of the first TeX output drivers, for an IBM golf-ball typewriter. I am not a computer guru, but have a circle of highly-qualified friends in the Irish Linux Users Group (ILUG) who will ensure that any changes I make to the HOWTO will be accurate. gpg key: <http://www.gayleard.com/gayleard-pubkey.asc>

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Passive voice == evil.
by Paul W. Frields 23 Dec '07

23 Dec '07

I have looked over a wide variety of random insertions in some of our docs and see a lot of passive voice being used. Please try to use active voice in docs instead of passive voice wherever possible. The folloiwng is an example of the difference between active and passive voice: PASSIVE (incorrect): In Fedora 8, a new tool called "FooBar" has been introduced to help users create foobars. ACTIVE (correct): Fedora 8 includes a new tool called "FooBar" that helps users create foobars. Generally, passive voice includes unnecessary forms of the verb "to be," such as "has been," "is," or "was." Passive voice is unnecessarily difficult for translators in some locales to address. Here is one way to test for unnecessary passive voice. If the sentence includes a form of the verb "to be," does it: (A) describe an *attribute* of the sentence's subject, or (B) describe something that happened? If the answer is (B), the sentence probably uses passive voice and should be reworded. Today's English composition tip is brought to you by the letter "M" and the number 4. :-) -- Paul W. Frields, RHCE http://paul.frields.org/ gpg fingerprint: 3DA6 A0AC 6D58 FEC4 0233 5906 ACDB C937 BD11 3717 Fedora Project: http://pfrields.fedorapeople.org/ irc.freenode.net: stickster @ #fedora-docs, #fedora-devel, #fredlug

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Election reminder
by Ville-Pekka Vainio 23 Dec '07

23 Dec '07

Hi all, As Karsten mentioned on his blog <http://iquaid.org/2007/12/23/docs-election/>, tomorrow (the 24th of December) is the last day to vote in the FDSCo Elections. Nominations: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/DocsProject/SteeringCommittee/Nominations Election page: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/DocsProject/Policy/FDSCoElections Voting system: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/voting/ So, don't forget to vote! Also, happy holidays everyone! -- Ville-Pekka Vainio

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Self-introduction for Fedora documentation project
by Marcel Lambert 23 Dec '07

23 Dec '07

Hello, My name is Marcel Lambert. I became a practitioner of Linux due to internet security reasons with the release of Red Hat 9 and since then I live with it and maintain occasional notes at http://netston.tripod.com/Windows_Linux.htm. When choosing OS I am a conservative (you can call me rational minority), and I use both Linux and Windows and live with advantages and disadvantages of both. Originally, I got closely acquainted with computers about 25 year ago being a student in natural sciences, and moved to IT entirely shortly after. I designed and developed software, managed numerous IT projects. A turning point in my career was in Tradescape.com, later purchased by E*Trade, where I had managed a project (and was a key architect/developer) for MTrade platform for trading stocks on NASDAQ/NYSE. My internet nickname is ARMADILLO, and I am interested in writing about security topics and all the things in Fedora that help adventurous, safety-demanding armadillos explore the world with Linux :-) A+ # gpg --fingerprint 753472E1 pub 1024D/753472E1 2007-12-20 Marcel Lambert <lambert1791(a)gmail.com> Key fingerprint = 3C9D C0F6 F337 B3C0 C099 4BC6 3380 95D1 7534 72E1 sub 1024g/0BA991E9 2007-12-20

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meetings through 2007 and beyond
by Karsten Wade 23 Dec '07

23 Dec '07

Considering that our standing FDSCo meeting is so close to the major holiday season for 1/3rd of the world's population, and everyone is busy with $stuff, let's cancel the FDSCo meetings for the remainder of 2007. For the Sunday 6 January 2008 meeting, we'll be convening with the new FDSCo. One thing I'll recommend we decide is to have some combination of fewer meetings (twice monthly) and rotating schedule (to catch convenient times for all members.) Meanwhile, plenty to discuss and do here on list, asynchronously. ;-) - Karsten -- Karsten Wade, Developer Community Mgr. Dev Fu : http://developer.redhatmagazine.com Fedora : http://quaid.fedorapeople.org gpg key : AD0E0C41

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Important observation
by Karl Larsen 23 Dec '07

23 Dec '07

As I try to join the Fedora Doc I know a lot more about what is going on. The key issue is two fold. Did you get your key to MIT? Is MIT working now? The answer to both questions must be yes. I have known for some time that MIT is a key deposit computer and I once got a key to MIT. Now I know how to tell the answers. You MUST BOOKMARK on your web browser this: http://pgp.mit.edu/ And anytime you do anything with the Fedora Doc web page, you must first check to see if mit is working. Today the instructions tell you to send your key to another place that seems to work better. I found it worked fine,but, my key is not at mit so I can do nothing towards joining. It is important to tell the new member this information and let them know there is no way to continue joining. You just have to wait for someone to fix mit. Karl -- Karl F. Larsen, AKA K5DI Linux User #450462 http://counter.li.org. PGP 4208 4D6E 595F 22B9 FF1C ECB6 4A3C 2C54 FE23 53A7

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TQSG wrong submit link
by Francesco Tombolini 23 Dec '07

23 Dec '07

Hallo all, in the TQSG the link to submit translated .po file is still https://publictest5.fedora.redhat.com/submit/ but recently I found that is https://translate.fedoraproject.org/submit/module/ Should this be fixed in the next release? -- Francesco Tombolini <tombo(a)adamantio.net> Key fingerprint = EDA9 7504 AA93 CEFC 5990 1356 8584 6B05 F140 5F73 http://www.adamantio.net

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Adam Cooper - Self Introduction
by Adam Cooper 22 Dec '07

22 Dec '07

Adam G.F. Cooper Orillia, Ontario, Canada Landscape Labourer Michaelis Landscape I would be interested in helping with documentation for new users to fedora. Especially people migrating from Microsoft platforms. I have been involved with writing manuals for other charitable organizations. I documented a policy/manual for safe interaction with children. I have been working with computers for over 16 years now, unfortunately most of my skill currently is in Microsoft Platforms, as I have only enough skill currently to use Fedora and its applications I would not consider myself a "Power" user with Fedora, yet. I have my MCP and an older A+ Certification. I am able to type and I am able to use most word processing programs, and have been using the OpenOffice.org suite exclusively for 5 years now. I do have some programming skills but mostly with the BASIC language. I'm currently actively trying to learn HTML, PHP, and JavaScript. I would be a good candidate for this project because I believe in the Open Source concept, and would like to be able to contribute to it's projects and to help out where I can. GPG KEY: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- pub 1024D/0A249BB4 2007-12-22 [expires: 2008-12-21] Key fingerprint = 4158 B090 CAFB 8C4B 6471 36A0 80A6 9B45 0A24 9BB4 uid Adam Cooper (Documentation Project) <adamcooper(a)rogers.com> sub 2048g/327C2834 2007-12-22 [expires: 2008-12-21] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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Feedback on my first post
by Sudheer 22 Dec '07

22 Dec '07

Hello, I posted draft content to Apache Web Server under the "How to configure multiple domains on same host" section. This is the first time I added content to the Wiki. I would like to hear your feedback on the same. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Docs/Drafts/AdministrationGuide/Servers/WebSe… -- Thanks and regards, Sudheer Satyanarayana http://binaryvibes.co.in

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fixing what we can
by Karsten Wade 22 Dec '07

22 Dec '07

On Wed, 2007-12-19 at 14:47 +1000, Christopher Curran wrote: > I have to agree, fedora docs project is by far the hardest project I've > ever tried to join. Previous development projects all I had to do is > send an email and hey presto SVN write access. This whole process is so > long and drawn out it is probably marginalising a whole swathe of > potential contributers. It is certain there are people who fall to the wayside with this process. The inevitability of that is a separate, semi-philosophical discussion. When you say "the fedora docs project", do you mean this sub-project itself? Or "the Fedora Project" in general? Most of the challenges we've discussed so far are all about the overall project joining process and not specific to Fedora Docs. We can do best by improving what we have in our purview. What have we discovered in the recent threads that we can directly fix from Fedora Docs or our positions elsewhere in Fedora? The second iteration of the Fedora account system (FAS2) is close to release. It resolves a lot of the historical problems of the old system. It does not, however, remove the requirement to agree to the CLA. However, the need to GPG sign the CLA may be required only for people who work on code and content that goes into a release. Since code and content from places such as bugzilla and the wiki can be filtered through people who have GPG-signed the CLA, a click-through can suffice where needed (the wiki, not bugzilla.) As Fedora has grown, we have a strange irony. Work we did in the past to resolve single-point problems ("Need wiki, must be Python? Moin Moin it is) have come to bite us as we are growing because they don't scale the way we need to. However, now that we have grown, it is harder to replace semi-broken stuff we have relied upon ("Migrate from the wiki? But we have 10,000 pages, DocBook XML dependencies, and on and on ...") Rooting these cases out and making them flexible, scalable, and best fit is a challenge that the Fedora Infrastructure and (now) Websites teams are doing a great job with over the last (almost) year. I'm *very* encouraged about our future here. - Karsten -- Karsten Wade, Developer Community Mgr. Dev Fu : http://developer.redhatmagazine.com Fedora : http://quaid.fedorapeople.org gpg key : AD0E0C41

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docs December 2007