TLDP Weekly News

Issue Number : 5
Publication Date : 2003-05-20

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. License on the LDP documents
3.2. man pages
4. Feedback and Contributions

1. New documents

1.1. Fresh@LDP

New documents this week:

  • After quite some struggle, here it is finally: the openMosix HOWTO, formerly known as the Mosix HOWTO, by Kris Buytaert.

  • An anonymous person wrote a document in Spanish explaining how to install the ICA Citrix client and use it with the popular Spanish PADRE program. Our colleagues from TLDP-ES made it available as the Padre-HOWTO.


1.2. Proposed new documents

  • Howard Shane sent in a proposal for a Scanner HOWTO

  • Weldon Goree proposed a HOWTO on what dual-booting and multi-booting are and how to do them.


1.3. Submitted for review


2. Updates

2.1. HOWTOs

After the problems were solved last week, a whole bunch of pending upgrades came through:


3. Happenings in the LDP world

3.1. License on the LDP documents

Colin Watson, who maintains the Debian packages for LDP documents sent in a mail indicating that the old manifesto boilerplate license used on a number of LDP documents was considered non-free by Debian legal. He sent in the note that the Debian doc-linux-html and doc-linux-text packages will use the GNU GPL, which is permitted by the clause 2. David Lawyer however noted that It's only requested (not required) that the author be contacted in case of modifications which may not render the license non-free.


3.2. man pages

Rahul Sundaram presented his opinion on man pages. He said that they cater to the expert who already knows what s/he is dealing with and provided a few examples. Antony E. Greene said that there are two different needs addressed by tutorial or step-by-step instructions like the HOWTOs and a terse, but comprehensive man on info page. Howard Shane and Machtelt Garrels were of the opinion that the LDP should offer its services to improve the quality of man pages but that would be a difficult task with the resources at the disposal of LDP.

While on the thread, Greg Ferguson asked if people would be interested in a collection of man pages (filtered to HTML via man2html; browseable, etc.) on the LDP site.

During the course of the discussion, jdd wondered if there was some sort of a locate_doc that could detect automatically all the documentation available for an application. People suggested scrollkeeper and dwww from the Debian project.


4. 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? We are curious ;-). You can help 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.