kikinovak MLED Founder

Registered: Jun 2011 Location: Montpezat (South France) Distribution: CentOS, OpenSUSE Posts: 3,441

Rep:

Slackware Documentation Project

Hi,



I'm currently busy building my company's current "Enterprise Desktop" based on Slackware 13.37 and numerous addons coming mostly from SlackBuilds.org.



Back in 2006, I had to make my first "professional" use of Linux, since I was hired by the local town hall to install a complete computer network in eleven small to medium-size public libraries using Linux and free software. Back then, I spent quite some time with fellow slacker Daniel de Kok on a project we called "Slick": a full-blown Linux desktop based on Slackware, sporting Xfce and offering everything you need for daily work: office and multimedia and Internet stuff, and all the rough edges sanded down. If I remember correctly, we had about 200 extra packages for our custom desktop, and for the vast majority of these, we wrote the SlackBuild files ourselves. Unfortunately, we met some real showstoppers... like the fact that Slackware still defaulted to a 2.4 kernel at the time, so no HAL and no auto-mounting devices, and so I ended up using a beefed-up CentOS for the job (which is still used there, BTW).



And now I think of the difference between then and now. The SlackBuilds.org project has just made my admin life so much easier. For about 90 percent of the extra stuff I need, I just fire up sbopkg (which is a GREAT tool) and build whatever I need. Sometimes, I download a script and change it when I want to patch it or build a more recent version. Right now I have something like two hundred extra packages, and I only had to write my own SlackBuild scripts from scratch for about a dozen of them. So the SlackBuilds.org project has significantly changed my life, here.



Now I look out of the window (birds looping in the blue sky over the south French countryside) and imagine another project. Sometimes when I look at the documentation of some distributions like Arch or Gentoo or other projects like LFS and FreeBSD, I can't help thinking that's something that also makes a difference. Now I know there are already some great documentation efforts that have been made for Slackware, by Eric Hameleers, Daniel de Kok, Alan Hicks and other ones. There's the highly informative Slackbook (which I read on my honeymoon back in 2005, don't laugh), there are the Slackworld articles, and there's countless blogs scattered over the internet about how to configure a LAMP server on Slackware, how to use Dnsmasq, etcetera. I've taken quite some information from all these places. Eric Hameleers' wiki proved highly valuable for setting up a working Samba server, Daniel de Kok's Slackware book taught me how to use tagfiles, and so on. And now I imagine a project similar to the SlackBuilds.org project that would centralize all the available information for Slackware. It would work like the SlackBuilds.org project, the only difference being that folks wouldn't submit SlackBuild scripts, but articles about specific subjects ("How to build an initrd", "How to use MPlayer on the command-line", "How to configure 3D acceleration on an Intel video card", and so on). And like the SlackBuilds.org site is organized in categories, this site (slackdocs.org?) would also be organized in sections ("Package Management", "Multimedia", "Networking", and so on...) And like the SlackBuilds.org project, the site would be "run" by a staff of qualified volunteers, who would proofread, approve/reject, organize sections, etc.



What do you think?



PS: one first thing to do eventually would be to gather and organize the huge pile of existing information in the above mentioned places. The big idea behind this being: "OK, I need a piece of information, I'm gonna check slackdocs.org (or whatever) to see how it's done..." Last edited by kikinovak; 08-17-2012 at 02:24 AM .