Mad Penguin Launches Slackware Handbook Project

An anonymous reader writes "Mad Penguin's Adam Doxtater and Narayan Newton have launched a community-driven site dedicated to bringing the power and depth of the FreeBSD Handbook to Slackware Linux users. The site allows for the community to create and edit its own content. A simple voting system is in place to make sure the content that makes it into the handbook is of the highest quality. This is something that has been needed for some time and the idea of being able to edit our own material is really nice. A very unique project. Read the press release at LinuxPR.com."

Not true..

[Turn-X Alphonse]

Unique means "original". Not "Wiki with a moderation system similar to Slashdots".

Gentooism!

[linolium]

It's good to see that Gentoo's in-depth handbook is starting to catch on with other Linux distributions (not to say they didn't borrow the idea from somewhere else).

It's an excellent way to document Linux instead of having to sift through a long README document or rtfm man pages.

Good for Slackware...

[ltwally]

This is a wonderful step for Slackware. The FreeBSD Handbook is an incredible reference and guide, and every OS should have something similar....

But what of the 100+ other gnu/linux distributions out there? One of linux's greatest strengths (and weaknesses) is the insane number of distributions and the sometimes strikingly large differences between distros. This book will work for Slackware, and maybe help with a few of the slack-based distros... but probably won't be much help for fedora, gentoo, or the other distros.

But what do I know... I'm just a silly FreeBSD user, and this is only my two cents. ;)

Best of luck w/ the slackware handbook!

FreeBSD Handbook in Plcuker format

[hacker]

I've had the original FreeBSD handbook [freebsd.org] fetched nightly and converted to Plucker format [plkr.org] for awhile now. Take a look, its a beautiful piece of work.

I do this for quite a few other pieces of work (the Gentoo handbook, PHP Documentation [plkr.org] (in 21 languages, it looks spectacular in color), the Creating XPCOM book [mozilla.org] is even available in Plucker format [plkr.org], as well as many others.

These are not straight conversions, they require actual human eyes to look over them, test them, add navigation and other elements. For example, look at the Plucker version of the 9/11 Report [plkr.org] that I did. I added a LOT of functionality that wasn't there in the original version. (I also put my pristine HTML source version online [gnu-designs.com] for anyone to read. You can see the additional features I've added in that copy).

I'll be making a lot more of my stealth works public soon.

When they're finished with the Slackware Handbook, I'd be more than happy to look it over, do the conversion, and provide it in a mobile format for our user community.