On Fri, 2006-11-24 at 22:09 +0300, John Babich wrote:

I propose we spearhead a FOSS community-wide project. This naturally involves upstream and cross-stream participation and cooperation.

BTW, if this project already exists, please let me know. I would like to join it.

I believe if you look in the archives, you'll find a proposal from this year about this very subject. I think it came from someone in Red Hat's India office, although as an "extramural" project (i.e., don't expect funding). :-) I will check my Gmail when I get a chance.

I've already signed up with the Fedora document project and am deep into the first documents. I use KDE myself so I'll probably not sign up as a Gnome writer except maybe for specific Gnome apps I like or a more general part of the process.

What I would like to see is more cooperation between KDE, Gnome and other desktop managers. Linux is about freedom right? Yet distros like Ubuntu don't even bother including KDE in the base install. Gnome under SUSE can be a real pain. What major distro doesn't include not just both but other commonly used desktop managers? I'm seeing clique like behavior. Elitism and snobbery that will turn people away from Linux in droves. The C/C++ snobbery has already hurt Linux badly. I'm sorry but not everybody like C based languages. We should be bending over backwards to accomadate people not drive them away from Linux.

My 2 cents.

Drac

On 11/24/06, John Babich jmbabich@gmail.com wrote:

On 11/25/06, Paul W. Frields stickster@gmail.com wrote:

...

On Fri, 2006-11-24 at 22:09 +0300, John Babich wrote:

...

I believe if you look in the archives, you'll find a proposal from this year about this very subject. I think it came from someone in Red Hat's India office, although as an "extramural" project (i.e., don't expect funding). :-) I will check my Gmail when I get a chance.

Thanks, Paul. Most "great ideas" have already been discovered. I never assumed that there would be funding available. What I propose is making this a formal project, perhaps using Sourceforge as a focal point. We can then make it known to the FOSS community at large.

I'll check out your lead. If it's a Red Hat employee who's already on the same wavelength, so much the better.

John Babich

-- fedora-docs-list mailing list fedora-docs-list@redhat.com To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-docs-list

LOL.. Thought I was responding to a Fedora help group I often answer questions on.

On 11/25/06, John Babich jmbabich@gmail.com wrote:

On 11/25/06, Dan Smith draciron@gmail.com wrote:

Ubuntu does have Kubuntu, a separate distribution. Anyway, some good news for Fedora KDE users:

It's an unofficially supported distro. Basically Ubuntu has said if you don't use Gnome for your desktop then good luck. KDE can of course be installed afterwards but post install KDE or Gnome installations tend to be messy and very time consuming. At least the last time I've done it which was 3 or 4 years ago.

There is a plan is to merge Fedora Core and Extras in FC7. This

eliminates one barrier. There will be no second-class citizens, but there will still be default apps at installation time. I hope that a complete KDE can be installed from the start with the merger of the repositories. I use both KDE and GNOME. Getting a *complete* KDE installation on FC6 is a bit of a pain. What can be installed by default vs choice at install time is being actively discussed. Now's a good time to push for more KDE.

I hate the default install options of Fedora so much that I ALWAYS choose custom install. Some really excellent software like K3b, Midnight Commander, ncftp, KDE and any KDE apps and the list goes on of stuff left out of the default Fedora install. I also have a preferred partitioning scheme and the default install wants to wipe that out. One of the things I'm covering in the Admin doc is potential partitioning schemes commonly used and the positives and downsides of each.

- Other Fedora Project members are pushing to integrate KDE more

cleanly into Fedora. See http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/UnleashKDE.

Thank you. I plan to visit that frequently.

Fedora Core and Extras include GNOME, KDE and XFCE (Yes, I even use

XFCE on low-end machines). You can add others. It so happens that GNOME is the default windows manager. This, of course, makes GNOME an easier install.

Aye, Fedora as long as you do a custom install will do a nice job of installing KDE. Except for grabbing some extras like MP3 support which Fedora doesn't have the luxory of supporting thanks to RIA, I'm very happy with the KDE install. I click a few extra utils that i like using while I'm adding KDE, then afterwards I hit gnome-yum, sourceforge and freshmeat and I have all my favorite apps.

Though I have some feature requests. I tried to make one through bugzilla but the walk through dialog spun Firefox into some sort of endless loop. I went to bed, got up six hours later and it still hadn't finished populating the package list. I'd report it except LOL. I'll try in a few days to skip the wizard and see if it'll give me the normal Bugzilla. One of those requests would be an easier way to save what packages are installed. I'd love nothing more for Fedora to read what I had installed last time, present me a custom install where I could go through and add or subtract software rather than doing it every time by hand. The alternate is just as bad by editing the install files manually and only worth it if you are doing large numbers of installs. For example I just went up to FC6 on this machine from FC3. (Been running FC5 since it came out on one machine, almost that long on my third) Spent a good part of a day with gnome-yum re-installing files, then another few hours downloading tarballs of stuff that wasn't in any repositories.

Clique behavior is always bad for FOSS. One of the goals of the Fedora Docs

project is to lower the barrier of entry. We should have a "big tent".

Not with Fedora Docs. Folks here are very friendly. I'm talking about the wider Linux community. Think of it in these terms. VB has billions of lines of code out there. One of the things that have literally kept many people using windoze is VB. Believe it or not years after the last and final release there are still thousands of coders hacking more VB code. Gambas and the Mono project offer two different alternitives to VB yet nobody knows about them. Suggest a non-C like language to many Nix people and they get this really sour look on their face. LISP, Smalltalk and dozens of other non-C like languages have excellent support on Linux. Nobody knows about it. Think about this as a TCO proposal to a company. Move to Linux and they save the cost of the OS, buying the latest Microsoft visual studio/ More code will port from VB to Gambas than from VB to .net so they save countless man hours while porting to a more secure, stable OS that doesn't require the frequent hardware upgrades that windoze requires. Most windoze users think of VI and Gnu C when they think of Linux. That's an image we want to change.

Fedora by default doesn't install Gambas or most of the non-C languages. Hell the default doesn't even install most compilers period. Even if you never write a line of code dozens of apps will complain if you don't have Perl, Python and others. What do fresh windoze users do when they want to use the equiv of Access for example? I've found a few, haven't had a chance to check them out but out of three I figure one ought to be pretty good.

A new Linux user is going to want to know what to use in place of the apps they are used to using. That is not cut and dried in Linux. Many of the lists that do such are poorly maintained or give only really basic options. Might be a good document for us to add. It also might be a really good idea for many of those apps to be in the default install.

One obstacle is lousy or non-existent documentation. We can change that.

We can also work more closely with other FOSS projects on a complete FOSS toolchain for FOSS documents.

Aye, hoping to do my part on that.

A new point:

What are the implications of a choice of either GNOME or KDE at install time, or shortly thereafter?

To be honest unless disk space is at a premium choosing to install only one of those gives a user half a desktop. Grip, K3b, Gnome-yum and so on. Neither desktop is complete in my opinion. A user can muddle along with apps that are not as good but exist in the given desktop. For the complete Linux experience, at least from a GUI standpoint both should be installed. Between both desktops and the 1,500 +other apps/utils I install I'm still using less than 5 gigs disk space on my / partition which includes every one of the default partitions except /home. I'm like a kid in a candy store every time I visit freshmeat or pull up gnome-yum LOL. For most users 5 gigs is nothing. At least a gig of that 5 on mine is stuff most people wouldn't install. So your talking 3 to 4 gigs of stuff that give a Fedora user so many good tools to work with. Allows users a great amount of choice. If Konquerer isn't doing it for them then they can use MC or Nautalis for example. While using KDE as the window manager. If they are using Gnome apps like K3b are really nice things to have installed default.

We will need an equivalent Desktop User Guide for KDE like what now exists

for GNOME. See http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Docs/Drafts/DesktopUserGuide. This should probably be a separate document for now.

I'd be happy to start on that soon as I finish the Admin docs.

I'm willing to get a KDE version started on the Wiki. I can't do it

alone. Just be sure to leave the GNOME version intact. Depending on how the default window manager discussions go, this may eventually need to be merged with GNOME into one document. Of course, some default apps are really KDE apps. The user doesn't know it. There is already a degree of integration between GNOME and KDE. Initiatives exist to make the integration tighter.

I don't use Gnome very often. Mostly on machines where KDE isn't there or helping a user who chose Gnome as a desktop manager. So I would use the Gnome guide as an example for the KDE guide but would not modify it directly. If I saw something I wanted to add or suggest I'd contact the author directly.

We have to remember the target audience in any case. The current DUG is

aimed at users without root access. We don't even discuss updates at this level. We don't mention GNOME or KDE.

Except for corporate users and untrusted family members most people running Fedora I think will have local root. Unless they are non-technical or not as technical as they think they are :) I prefer to give local root to users. Things like configuring printers, installing software and modifying the environment are pretty essential to most users. They are also things that most users coming from the windoze world are used to being able to do themselves. Found that I spent less time fixing machines where people abused local root powers than doing mundane tasks for people who didn't have local root. Machines got scanned for rootkits and I laid eyeballs on the logs of machines pretty frequently so things went fairly smoothly.

So in my opinion %70 or more of Fedora users are going to have local root. Most users not on a machine they own will not have root access to the servers they are connected too. So there is value in covering both situations.

In any case, in light to recent events, I suspect interest in KDE on Fedora

will grow.

KDE is a very popular desktop manager. Default desktop on many distros. So for folks coming over from Mandriva , SUSE or who got to learn Linux from playing with Knoppix as an example they are going to want to stay with KDE. Many long time Linux users like myself swear by KDE. In a poll I saw on a LUG the usage between KDE and Gnome was pretty evenly split and about %10 going with really lightweight desktops or the more exotic desktops. No idea if this representive of the Linux community as a whole. I suspect it is.

Drac

Dan Smith wrote:

...

What I would like to see is more cooperation between KDE, Gnome and other desktop managers. Linux is about freedom right? Yet distros like Ubuntu don't even bother including KDE in the base install. Gnome under SUSE can be a real pain. What major distro doesn't include not just both but other commonly used desktop managers? I'm seeing clique like behavior. Elitism and snobbery that will turn people away from Linux in droves. The C/C++ snobbery has already hurt Linux badly. I'm sorry but not everybody like C based languages. We should be bending over backwards to accomadate people not drive them away from Linux.

Cooperation between KDE, Gnome, and other Desktop managers would be great to see. However, I think it should be at the upstream level between the various projects themselves. As to dissing other distributions for what they choose to include in the distribution, I think that is uncalled for. For instance, Ubuntu has made a concerted effort to provide as complete a desktop environment as possible on a single CDROM disk. If they were to put KDE as well as Gnome on the disk, something else would have to go. Since KDE and Gnome serve the same function, they made a choice, and with many other applications with multiple selections, they made choices there as well. But in the end, they were able to create a very complete desktop environment and put it on a single CD. If the user wants to add KDE, they can select it for install in the "Synaptic Package Manager" and get a very complete KDE desktop very easily, or use the command line and type "sudo apt-get install kde" to get the same thing.

I find it hard to believe that giving someone who is having trouble with his Windows machine and wanting to try something else, a single CD that provides him with an environment he can play around with and install if he likes it, will turn people away from Linux. On the contrary, I believe it gives many people an easy path to entering into the Linux world.

George

On Sat, 2006-11-25 at 22:05 -0500, George Ganoe wrote:

Cooperation between KDE, Gnome, and other Desktop managers would be great to see. However, I think it should be at the upstream level between the various projects themselves. As to dissing other distributions for what they choose to include in the distribution, I think that is uncalled for. For instance, Ubuntu has made a concerted effort to provide as complete a desktop environment as possible on a single CDROM disk. If they were to put KDE as well as Gnome on the disk, something else would have to go. Since KDE and Gnome serve the same function, they made a choice, and with many other applications with multiple selections, they made choices there as well. But in the end, they were able to create a very complete desktop environment and put it on a single CD. If the user wants to add KDE, they can select it for install in the "Synaptic Package Manager" and get a very complete KDE desktop very easily, or use the command line and type "sudo apt-get install kde" to get the same thing.

One of the big challenges we are facing here is figuring out how to satisfy the needs of all the distros and projects with a documentation commons.

Perhaps the first order of business would be to figure out:

1. Is there something that can be done in making a commons? 2. Is there an outcome that is worth the effort? 3. Do other distros and projects care?

- Karsten

On 11/25/06, Karsten Wade kwade@redhat.com wrote:

[snipped lots of thought-provoking ideas...what follows is a small excerpt]

So, to be clear, I'm "totally into" this idea, which is Californiaese for, "Yes, let's do it."

I appreciate your cross-cultural sensitivity. We East-Coasters sometimes need Californiaese-to-East-Coastese translations.

I'd like to see some input from across this project and mailing list; we have quite a few people who lurk here and have insight.

Hey, Debianistas! Ubuntuarians! Suseneros! Solarisas! Slackers! Gentootians!

And every other project large and small!?!

I totally agree with your clarion call.

Lurkers of the FOSS world, unite!

As for the rest of your reply, I am mulling over your response. My initial response is definitely to give more support to the Linux Documentation Project. This is another FOSS project to which I owe a great debt.

I also like the Summit concept. I hope to map out a fairly clear spec on the FOSS toolchain. This entitles starting from a clear grasp of what is available right now.

John Babich

On 11/25/06, Karsten Wade kwade@redhat.com wrote:

On Fri, 2006-11-24 at 22:09 +0300, John Babich wrote:

Yes, and as you have already imagined, many projects are in this first step, and know it, and aren't sure how to move from there.

I'd suggest, or really second as this idea has already been put forth that we begin by opening channels of communication between us and others in similer endeavors.

If there is enough interest here to really get something of this magnitude started, let's knock around all the tough stuff for a few weeks. I'd like to sponsor a teleconference + IRC + gobby + $whiteboard-app mini-summit for all those who are interested in moving this forward. From today, it seems like January would be a good time; give us about five to six weeks of mailing list activity and research before getting together to hammer out a proposal to take to other FLOSS projects.

That sounds like a good idea. Question of whether other projects are as interested in co-opertive efforts.

This is interesting, the focus/inclusion of toolchain within this. I'll

get back to that.

...

This project is bigger than all of us. This is where we need to realize that the entire FOSS community needs to be involved. Every FOSS project needs documentation. It seems every project also has a problem producing it.

Documentation, coding and all other aspects. It's volenteers doing the work. So people as they are able and willing to produce bits and pieces, the weak spot of Open Source. How can you set a deadline on somebody doing things purely out of good will? They have to pay bills first. Many companies have generously donated the services of employees to work on OS projects on company time. That has helped tremendously. I think that may be the best route. Companies that depend on OSS efforts can see the clear benifits in allowing people to work part time on OSS projects. Promoting this may be a way to give people more time for OSS projects.

1. There aren't as many commonalities between distros as there are

differences

I found that distros based on the Red Hat model like Mandriva, Knoppix, Cent OS and SUSE to have quite a bit in common and very little difference. I can sit down at a Mandriva machine and forget what distro I am on. SUSE has noticable differences but most things run exactly like they do on Fedora. The tools vary some in the GUI. Especially for system maintenance. If you go to the configuration files they look almost exactly the same.

I havn't installed Ubuntu so I have little idea on the differences. I installed the most recent Debian distro a few years back when my company was deciding on what distro to move too after Red Hat split into Enterprise and Fedora. There were some noticable differences in many areas but the core of it was just plain Linux like any other distro I've worked with. The big diffences were again in the GUI and system tools like package managers. I also tried out Free BSD, a Gentoo distro, SUSE, Mandriva and a couple less well known distros. Free BSD had the most differences obviously since it was not Linux. Still even between Linux and BSD there was a core feel that was easy to adapt too. Unlike Solaris which did some rather odd things in my opinion. ls is ls, df is df. /etc was /etc while you might find a few things moved around the core of it stayed the same. The differences seemed to be things like tarball vrs rpm vrs apt-get and the many other variations on how to install an app. The GUI or lack there of for configuring a file that is identical or nearly identical in various distros.

I think that a common documentation project would help bring the best of each distro to other distros. I wouldn't be surprised to see package managers like yum and apt-get agree on a common interface. The internals might be different but standardizing the interface for the best usability would make it easier for all. Many GUI apps are distro independent. So while under the hood there are differences, to the end user the distro is transparent while using a tool like grip or the desktop itself whether it be Gnome or KDE or a lightweight window manger or while not running X at all. Apache is apache, MySQL is MySQL. The location might be different for the files but the files are the same and what you do with those apps and files are the same.

2. Any body that does this work is going to spend a significant amount

of time dealing with politics and in-fighting

That is the question. The politics and the my distro is better than your distro kind of thing. Another set of politics is old school Nix vrs new school Nix. That's a knot to resolve.

In the end, it might be the last one that is the true challenge. People like what they like and don't want to change over to what I like or what you like. If we don't want to make fixing the attitude of all

One of the beauties of Linux is the freedom of choice and the ability of each and every user to build a machine that fits them like a glove. What is a great way of doing things for one person may be a horrible way of doing it for another. Lyx might be a great tool for some. Others will prefer to work in HTML based technologies.

The solution is simple. A standardized output format that allows people to use what tools suite them best in the creation then they merely export to the needed format or submit a common format to be converted to the standardized format.

I do have a problem with the Unix man page format myself. Most are about as useful as no documentation at all. Especially to newer users. The options are often not well explained and frequently missing options that have been added since the creation of the man page. A good man page has extensive examples, many man pages completely lack examples at all or only have examples of the most basic usage. I and many others turn to Google rather than man pages for the bulk of our documentation reference. There we find usage examples that can easily be modified to suite what we are trying to do. There are no man pages for most GUI apps, the help pages usually missing or very bare.

Most importantly, the idea of the info pages seems to have been really abandoned. The Info pages were an attempt to address organizing tools by tasks and giving users and alphabetical list to look through as well. I'd love to see an X version of info which had the kind of details you find in a X versions of Yum. Since I started using gnome-yum I've discovered dozens of really useful tools I have had on my machines for years but just didn't know about. Few people really realize the power of the software already on most Linux distros. I would suggest that as a format. Look at the way Gnome-yum organizes packages to download and the kind of descriptions you get. What if you could do the same thing with documentation? Search, browse by catagories since many pieces of software will have multiple catagories and by various types of tags that can be applied such as X app, networking tool, sys admin tool, Windows connectivity software and so on. I think such a tool would be a help to long time and new Linux users alike.

3. Distro only. We could start a new, cross-distro documentation

commons. Maybe use an existing umbrella organization to work under, so it can hold single control (joint copyright, etc.), sort of like an FSF for documentation. One issue that comes up immediately is license, which is where the common upstream entity is valuable. It can provide multiple licenses for downstream use, who would have to multi-license (n +1) all content they contributed back up. Lots of complexity, and we need to research the actual value. For example, how much work would this be v. putting human energy into converting all man pages to XML and making a Web interface (Wiki) for editing them. This cross-project would be a lot of effort into interacting components. The "Wiki in front of man pages" would be putting content editing directly in the control of the communities, and then we all just advertise manpagecommons.org/wiki. :)

The easy way is to create it and let them come. If we created a tool like an X version of info that covered all aspects of Linux, then it would be fairly simple to attach distro specific flags to areas. To denote in common documentation variations between distros or if for example your sitting there at your desktop on a Fedora machine helping a Mandriva user you can switch to a Mandriva centric view of the documentation. Each distro's documenation projects responsible for contributions to the project as a whole.