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Linux Software

Building a Large Linux Knowledgebase 251

Posted by michael from the bookmarkable dept.
linuxfan writes "It looks like LinuxQuestions.org is aiming to build the largest independent Linux-related knowledgebase using a Wiki. They are using the same software as Wikipedia (MediaWiki), are using a Creative Commons license and look to be off to a good start."
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Building a Large Linux Knowledgebase More

Building a Large Linux Knowledgebase

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  • All you'll ever need to know... (Score:4, Funny)

    by ackthpt ( 218170 ) * on Friday March 05, 2004 @06:06PM (#8480358) Homepage Journal
    void main()
    {
    printf("42");
    }

    • That isn't all I need to know... I also need to know what the question is!
    • What you need to know is that main returns int!!!

  • They have that.... (Score:5, Funny)

    by JustinXB ( 756624 ) on Friday March 05, 2004 @06:06PM (#8480364)
    It's called Google.
    • http://google.com/linux/ [google.com] - Linux searches ;)

    • Re:They have that.... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ciroknight ( 601098 ) on Friday March 05, 2004 @06:15PM (#8480463)
      I know this a stab at being funny, but...

      The truth is pretty simple. Google's not enough. Sometimes for the most obscure questions, either most people consider you a nub and tell you to RFTM (which, in many cases, no manual exists), or they don't know themselves how to solve the problem. So, we often spend hours and hours going through google to find out how to get X hardware to work on Y configuration to find that Alan Cox had brilliantly broken my soundcard in 2.4.20... These are the kinds of things that there really should be a one-stop place to find what you need..

      Surprisingly, it's taken this long for anyone to realize this...

      • Re:They have that.... (Score:4, Informative)

        by JungleBoy ( 7578 ) on Friday March 05, 2004 @06:29PM (#8480589)
        You just need to click on the 'groups' tab in google. :) So many linux mailing lists are piped onto usenet, that just about every question asked shows up there. Essentially google groups lets you globally search nearly all linux mailing lists.

      • Re:They have that.... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by timeOday ( 582209 ) on Friday March 05, 2004 @06:29PM (#8480590)
        The other big problem is that information goes rapidly out of date.

        Say you need to make a file over 2GB (very common in video processing) and you stumble across this page [netcom.com]. You come away thinking linux doesn't support large files, when really it does. In this case you can scroll all the way to the bottom and the author is nice enough to have timestamped the page - 1998. But still, how do you know whether the old information is outdated? Even if you choose some arbitrary cutoff date ("information after Jan 1, 2003 is likely to be fresh") how do you tell google to only find information after that date? You can't.

        Unfortunately there's no easy solution to the problem of outdated information. Useful documentation takes attention and manpower. But perhaps an easily modifiable Wikki-format will encourage more updates and more participation than comparable efforts such as The Linux Documentation Project [slashdot.org], which is really just a smattering of FAQs, HOWTO-s, guides, and man pages with no real coherence - full of duplication and stale information.

        • Re:They have that.... (Score:3, Informative)

          by timeOday ( 582209 )
          Sorry I botched the link to The Linux Documentation Project [tldp.org] in my previous post.

        • I like this idea more for the people who are starting out using linux. I've been on it for a while, and have had my share of problems looking for simple answers to simple questions. Something like this will go a long way to providing a solid resource for people new to the OS, which is a very good thing.

          Of course, being a Wiki and all, it applies that same supercool open source ethos to the answering of questions. You can put that information about large file sizes up there to help someone out when they

      • So what? There are so many expert mailing groups/web sites ou there, you just go to your favourite and ask the question. Experts-express is my favorite collobration site. Putting these kinds of info into a wiki is not very useful because what you need is a question-answer driven mechanism, if you can't find the solution to your problem in google.

        I've just been into linuxquestions's wiki page and browsed into X11 configuration... It tells me that mouse is the hardest thing to get going. Rubbish. Absolutely r

        • I've just been into linuxquestions's wiki page and browsed into X11 configuration... It tells me that mouse is the hardest thing to get going. Rubbish. Absolutely rubbish.

          It certainly was true for me on both X11 installs (manual ones - first Debian then Gentoo). Getting the USB mouse recognized by the kernel in the first place was confusing, but it took me even longer to make X11 look for a USB mouse with 3 buttons and a wheel - not that the wheel worked in all apps even when the X11 configuration seemed/
    • It's called Google.

      Yes, but that's what they* want you to know and when they* want you to know it.

      *'They' being those who buy words on Google.

      • Re:Selective Intelligence (Score:4, Informative)

        by justMichael ( 606509 ) on Friday March 05, 2004 @06:52PM (#8480781) Homepage
        I think you may be confusing your search engines. I have yet to see any search on google where AdWords has any effect on the actual search results.

        Since they are listed down the side of the page and not mixed in with the search results and the "Sponsored Links" at the top, it's kind of hard to mix them up.

        And if you can buy better results from google, please let me know. Google surfers convert at a much higher rate than all of the other PPC options.
    • While I'll agree it's my first place to turn for Linux help, it can sometimes be hard to determine what someone else may have called the sme problem.

      Did the program "break execution", "abend", "dump core", "crap out", "stop working", "fault in the xyz subroutine"?

      Sometimes the word one person would use would be completely different than another.

      Or, if you simplify your search too much to avoid the above, you get so many hits, most not relevant.

      But hey...it's still better than the MS Knowledgebase for th

  • Eh? Largest? Huh? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Dark Lord Seth ( 584963 ) on Friday March 05, 2004 @06:07PM (#8480374) Journal

    What about The Linux Documentation Project [tldp.org]? Provides plenty of knowledge to me about pretty much anything Linux related...

    • Re:Eh? Largest? Huh? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      The only problem with the Linux Documentation Project is that it tends to have a lot of outdated information there.

      The Wikipedia should be more up-to-date.

      Then again - I just Google. . . . .

    • Re:Eh? Largest? Huh? (Score:3, Informative)

      by _Sharp'r_ ( 649297 )
      Next they'll be wanting a special search index at Google like BSD [google.com] users have...


      ... oh, that's right, there is one for Linux [google.com].
    • Maybe it's just me, but I find that site hopelessly in-navigable. Hours of clicking in circles and the unfriendly color scheme, and you get about sick and tired of trying to learn the operating system. Maybe if they had a tutorial on how to use the site, I could learn more... ;)

      • Re:Eh? Largest? Huh? (Score:4, Informative)

        by Daytona955i ( 448665 ) <flynnguy24@yaho[ ]om ['o.c' in gap]> on Friday March 05, 2004 @06:33PM (#8480637)
        I agree... LDP has gone down in quality over the years as linux has gotten more popular. Outdated stuff stays up and their site is a pain to navigate and search. I mean, how many different kinds of tutorials do you need? You have HOWTOs in both regular and mini sizes though authors really don't do anything different. (like making the mini ones shorter and to the point) Then you have Guides which are more like books. While they may have their use, I have never really found one on a topic I need an explanation for. (Especially that in-depth) Therefore I'm more likely to look at a book for information of that scale first as they are usually better. And again, a lot of times if you do find something that might be useful, it's mostly out of date. Then you have FAQ's... There aren't that many and I doubt questions obout the topics listed are really asked all that frequently.

        I mean it's a nice idea and most of the guides that were around when I first started using linux (about 9-10 years ago) were excelent. In fact, some of them are still useful but they need updating!

        TLDP also needs a redesign of their site. Maybe have a section for newbies and then other sections based on what you want help on instead of just grouping all the HOWTOs together. It's a beast to look through. If I want to find information on an editor I need to know to look for vi or Emacs.. it would be nice to click on an Editors section and see all the documentation relating to editors.

    • Re:Eh? Largest? Huh? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by chipster ( 661352 )

      The difference is that this is a wiki. Anyone can update the wiki. Updating LDP docs ain't that easy - and goes through a lot of (and much needed) review cycles which takes quite some time before it is actually published.

      This wiki knowledgebase idea is novel, in that it will allow more docs, pushed to the users in much more rapid fashion.

    • Re:Eh? Largest? Huh? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by gotr00t ( 563828 )
      Most of the stuff there is very dated, probably because of either the fact that GNU/Linux is developing at such a rapid pace, or because nobody bothers to write documentation when they see any sign of existing doc.

      For example, there currently is only _one_ Chinese support on Linux FAQ, and it not only does not talk about Simplified Chinese, which is, last time I checked, a standard, but is terribly, terribly outdated.

      The very structure of LinuxQuestions.org may allow them to produce documentation that i

    • Re:Eh? Largest? Huh? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by koody ( 575863 )
      tldp has a lot of articles, but unfortunately very few people will have the energy to contact the maintainers to correct errors. A review takes days, weeks or months and is done all too rarely. Many will see updating a long document as a very daunting project to undertake.

      A wiki would solve this problem, since it is so easy to add information.

      I've read many howtos with information that has been slightly wrong, a path has changed, a new configuration option has been added. Usually it has been quite obvi

    • Re:Eh? Largest? Huh? (Score:5, Funny)

      by bgeer ( 543504 ) on Friday March 05, 2004 @07:06PM (#8480888)
      I am probably out of date and things are much better now, but I (and probably a lot of other people) have an aversion to anything named a HOWTO after spending many futile hours trying to decode them in the mid-to-late 90s when there was no other help available.

      For those of you who mercifully missed out on this era, generally a HOWTO would

      (a) Point you to software that no longer compiled on any platform known to man

      (b) Advise you to use configuration options that existed only in development versions and never worked even then.

      (c) Assume that you know how to use an equally complex program that has its own HOWTO which points you back to the one you started with.

      (d) give great explanations like: Ok for this file you just use syntax like a=1 to set a equal to 1. For example to make it fly to the moon just type:
      $foo53r45$::564.config <-> FALSE
      DiskBo$xInvolvement.Underpantsgnome = $PROFIT$

      etc...

      I am exaggerating VERY slightly. Anyone remember the DIP HOWTO? According to legend the suicide rate among Linux users tripled within three weeks of its release.

  • Great! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by AtariKee ( 455870 ) on Friday March 05, 2004 @06:09PM (#8480399)
    This is a great idea for those of us who find certain aspects of Linux a bit daunting. Between outdated HOWTOs and sometimes cryptic MAN pages, newbies such as myself can get a bit frustrated.

    My hope is that this database doesn't grow out of control with redundant and/or meaningless data.

    • Re:Great! (Score:3, Funny)

      by Raagshinnah ( 670749 )
      "My hope is that this database doesn't grow out of control with redundant and/or meaningless data."

      yeah, another slashdot would be too much for the internet to handle

    • Linux is easy:

      gunzip
      tar xvf
      perl Makefile.PL
      make
      make test
      make install
      run
      WTF!!!
      search google
      repeat

    • Then you'll like Wiki (Score:5, Informative)

      by lawpoop ( 604919 ) on Friday March 05, 2004 @06:40PM (#8480697) Homepage Journal
      The great thing about wiki is that it's very open. If you see redundant or meaningless data, delete it! Yes, you! It's very empowering.

      But wait, hold on! Did someone write trollish nonsense all over a beatiful how-to? Just roll back the changes.

      If this scares you (and it should, it's very powerful, very new), check out wikipedia.com [wikipedia.com]. It's totally self-policing and very well-kempt. You will quickly move from scared to excited.

      • FYI (Score:3, Informative)

        by Raul654 ( 453029 )
        IMHO (as a Wikipedia admin) what keeps that place running smoothly is a group of roughly 200 dedicated contributors, most of whom are admins.

  • rats! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by theMerovingian ( 722983 ) on Friday March 05, 2004 @06:10PM (#8480409) Journal

    The one thing [linuxquestions.org] keeping me from switching to Linux has a topic, but no one has posted any information there.

    Does linux gaming work, or do you just have to play Neverwinter Nights over and over? (reply some good stuff here, and stick it in the wiki, too).

    • I have a copy of Heroes3 [lokigames.com], best game for Linux I've seen.

    • Re:rats! (Score:3, Informative)

      by Zakabog ( 603757 )
      Depends on your video card, if your card is from nvidia it supports most of the games and you can play, WC3, Diablo II (really hard to get this working though), any game from ID software, UT2K3, UT2K4, Half-Life (any mods too, well haven't tried in a while I heard it no longer works :-/), there's a bunch of games too these are just games I've played.

      Now if you're unfortunate enough to be using an ATI card (and fortunate enough to get the drivers working, I did, once, and then just again 2 hours ago but t

      • Re:rats! (Score:4, Informative)

        by bersl2 ( 689221 ) on Friday March 05, 2004 @06:39PM (#8480693) Journal
        A few extra things:

        The Loki installer for Unreal Tournament is still freely downloadable, for those with the Windows version. You can play that.

        The binaries for Quake and Quake 2 are still linked to glide (I think). Fortunately, both games' source is under the GPL, so you can recompile for GLX.

        There are many ATI drivers (XFree86, ATI's binaries, DRI, Gatos), but none of them do everything well (or so I've heard). NVidia's drivers are wonderful, but binary-only ([sigh]... NDA...). I wish they were able to let us help with the drivers. XFree86's nv driver is still pretty good.

        You can use WINE to play many games non-native to Linux, like Half-Life (Damn You, Valve!(TM)), but it usually takes some tinkering. There is WineX, a commercial fork of WINE that specializes in getting games to work.

        Finally, just have a look around; you'd be surprised at what's available.

    • Re:rats! (Score:2, Informative)

      by Orien ( 720204 )
      Perhaps you should be looking at some [winehq.org] official [codeweavers.com] sites [transgaming.com]? You might find info a lot faster that way.

    • Re:rats! (Score:2, Informative)

      by adaran ( 757928 )
      Well, I consider myself a linux gamer - one without a windows partition. My interest in games has been a bit declining recently, resulting in me having only time to play the "big" games (it's hard to play more than one or maybe two games competitively at the same time, and I left out trying out new games to "relax" from the more "serious" games). Each genre has its references, or very popular games, multiplayer of course. For first person shooters that is Counterstrike, period. Now personally I don't like

  • Must have chosen LinuxQuestions.org... (Score:3, Funny)

    by spood ( 256582 ) on Friday March 05, 2004 @06:10PM (#8480410) Homepage Journal
    ...since README.org was already taken.

  • Software Knowledge = Hard (Score:5, Insightful)

    by darkmeridian ( 119044 ) <william.chuang@NOSPaM.gmail.com> on Friday March 05, 2004 @06:10PM (#8480413) Homepage
    This sounds like a good idea. However, there are two issues that would hinder something like this:
    1. Variability between Linuxes. There are many distros out there and they all have their own ways of doing the same things.

    2. Variability within Linuxes. Different distros also change their commands between versions. Any knowledge-base specific enough to be of help would have to be extremely thorough. A person working with a 2.4.22-gentoo-r3 kernel, for example, might have a different kernel than someone with the vanilla 2.4.22.

    However, if enough knowledgeable people use the system, then it will hopefully conquer these problems and be useful. But for now, see the gentoo forums for what open source documentation done by a community is capable of. (However, this is only within one distro that is relatively new so it has an easier time of things.)

    2.

    • Re:Software Knowledge = Hard (Score:5, Insightful)

      by dbIII ( 701233 ) on Friday March 05, 2004 @06:33PM (#8480630)
      1. Variability between Linuxes. There are many distros out there and they all have their own ways of doing the same things.
      It's not as different as you might think, so long as you don't try to apply visual memory of where menu items go on a button (ie. the MS Windows approach). The first time I used Redhat after using only slackware I found that only a few config files were in different spots, same with debian. My linux knowlege meant that I could do things the first time I sat down at an Irix, Solaris and AIX system. The difference between widely seperated varieties of *nix are far less than the differences between Win98 and any type of WinNT in terms of the commands you use. So long as the answers aren't to click on the third widget on the left, the knowlege can be applied across the board - after all, you can use RPMs on debian and do apt-get on redhat.
      Different distros also change their commands between versions.
      Often the answer is to run the old command, or download it again. Linux does not suffer from "DLL hell", while the default behaviour of rpm is to replace old libraries, if you really need them you can keep them. I have a jigsaw game on my machine that was last compiled in '96, so long as it can still find the original libraries it runs, and everything else just uses the newer version of those libraries - that's why they have names like somelibrary.6.2.so

    • Re:Software Knowledge = Hard (Score:4, Insightful)

      by ciroknight ( 601098 ) on Friday March 05, 2004 @06:40PM (#8480702)
      Truthfully, I've never used Gentoo (I don't desire to compile every piece of software by hand), but I've found that most of the time their forums are actually quite helpful. Why? Because someone down the line of creating Gentoo thought they should drop their elitest "I r t3h m4st0r h4xx0r" attitude and actually help people. This has been one of the reasons Linux has such a poor adoption rate, even though it's on the shelves right next to Windows in most cases.

      There are plenty of more reasons behind Linux's adoption rate, but think about it this way; if Microsoft and all of it's software was found to be illegal and everyone had to switch over tomorrow, how many governments, how many libraries, how many volumes of people would never touch a computer again because learning new software was too hard, due to people who knew how to use it feeling superior? GNU is all about sharing the knowledge, it's really time that we linux users take to the meaning of the GPL, and not just use it as a license to throw in people's faces.
      • Truthfully, I've never used Gentoo (I don't desire to compile every piece of software by hand)

        Yawn. That's not what it's about. A little program like ufed lets you set flags saying that you'll never need ldap support for any programs that you install. Then, next time you "emerge mod_php", it will leave out ldap support. (I know, that's a bad example because you have to specifically enable ldap support in it, but hey.) And you don't compile by hand. emerge package does it all for you. Try it out. It's go

    • Shouldn't it be Linuces?

      Unix => Unices
      Matrix => Matrices

      I don't know... I'm just asking.
  • I know it's already being attempted but Linuquestions has the benefit of thousands of visitors a day that are constantly learning and you can actually _watch_ their learning process through the posts. And when they want to give something back...Viola, this new Wiki!

  • 19 Articles!!! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Timesprout ( 579035 ) on Friday March 05, 2004 @06:13PM (#8480447)
    Without wishing to sound too sarcastic, you are going to need a tad more than 19 articles to convince me you have a valid knowledge repository. I'll stick with the Linux Documentation Project for the moment thanks

  • yet another wiki (Score:4, Interesting)

    by tronicum ( 617382 ) * on Friday March 05, 2004 @06:14PM (#8480454)
    Of course you can never have enough wikis. Question if how different they are and how they will do moderation (if they do)

    Wikipedia is a projekt driven by an community, LinuxQuestions.org is somewhat unclear to characterise: not clearly a community only or a business company selling ads within their content.

    As on always you should read the Rules [linuxquestions.org] before posting. registration is required, but email is optional.

  • Wikis everywhere (Score:5, Insightful)

    by koody ( 575863 ) on Friday March 05, 2004 @06:14PM (#8480459)
    It seems like wiki's would be the future of content creation on the web. It's becomeing increasingly popular, just look at the growth rate of wikipedia. Now volunteers are documenting tips and instructions for mozilla in a knowledgebase [mozillazine.org].

    Wiki's seem to bring together the reasons why the web is seen as useful (disregarding the free pr0n). Easy content creation, accessibility and ease of use. With wiki's you get the added benefit of a central repository to look for the information you need.

    As wiki's grow and become known the need for search engines might lessen. The first resort for information will change from google to the relevan wiki. Google will be seen as second in importance. After all, wiki has the structure of yahoo with the benefits of quality content.

    • useful wiki application (Score:4, Funny)

      by rtv ( 567862 ) on Friday March 05, 2004 @06:27PM (#8480575)
      I wish your comment was on a Wiki, because then I could edit it to remove all those apostrophes.
    • After all, wiki has the structure of yahoo with the benefits of quality content.

      Wiki has all the structure its users give it, including none at all. Wikis can be great, but they can also be worse than useless, including but not limited to faults such as outdated, derelict information, extremely confusing structure, layout and organisation, misinformation, and so on and so on. This is not a criticism of the Wiki idea as such, I'm just saying it's not a cure for everything. With good administration and main

  • Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Friday March 05, 2004 @06:16PM (#8480475)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Already exists: (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    ls /usr/share/man/*

    • Re:Already exists: (Score:3, Informative)

      by spun ( 1352 )
      You forgot:
      apropos 'foo'
      ls /usr/share/doc/*|grep 'foo'
      ls /usr/local/share/doc/*|grep 'foo'
      ls /usr/local/share/man/*|grep 'foo'
      info 'foo'
      ls /usr/share/info/*|grep 'foo'
      ls /usr/local/share/info/*|grep 'foo'
      grep 'foo' /*

      All that, and I still couldn't find any information about foo!

  • This is great untill (Score:5, Interesting)

    by miyako ( 632510 ) <miyako AT gmail DOT com> on Friday March 05, 2004 @06:32PM (#8480621) Homepage Journal
    This seems like a great idea, untill some smartass decides to mask harmful commands as solutions to obscure problems.
    Since it looks like anyone can update this thing, what happens when someone sneaks into a solution a command to write morse-code on the hard drive, or some command to rename all the files in /bin so that when you list all the files it does an asciiart of the goatse guy, or just throws in a "sudo rm -rf /" or something.
    Not that I don't think this is a good idea, but without some sort of review process I would personally feel nervous about sending some of my more inexperienced friends to the site and having them execute commands all willy nilly.
    I know that 99% of the users who would post something would do it out of an honest desire to help, in fact I will probably post a few things that I have had to do as obscure solutions to weird problems myself, but it only takes a single post to a problem that is just commen enough but not too comment to get a lot of people to fsck up their machines.

    • Re:This is great untill (Score:4, Insightful)

      by jjohnson ( 62583 ) on Friday March 05, 2004 @07:49PM (#8481177) Homepage
      Wikipedia gets enough traffic, and has enough regular users, that all changes are reviewed by at least a couple people, in practice; that's all that's needed to keep vandalism manageable, it appears. On a few obscure pages I've authored, mass deletions and nasty comments were removed within hours; the higher traffic pages are even more monitored, to the extent that 'editing wars' break out over them, requiring editors to lock pages for a period of time to let tempers cool.

      So what the linux questions wiki needs for reliability is a critical mass of users; the rest takes care of itself.
    • or just throws in a "sudo rm -rf /" or something

      I know this is beside your point, but I feel like nitpicking today.. Those of us who have tried this command, know that it wouldn't do as much damage as people believe. That's because it works recursively, alphabetically deleting all files. This means it'll start with /bin/, and will come to a stop when it gets to /bin/rm, leaving everything that comes after it (including everything in the other root-level directories) untouched. If you want to do the most da

      • I don't know what ghetto-ass Unix you've been using, but the way it's supposed to work is that the file is unlinked (this is why the "delete" function is unlink() and not delete() or something) but still open. This means that A> the filehandle for the open copy of rm will still point to the proper block, and more to the point, B> the blocks will not be overwritten by someone trying to allocate new blocks for a while until the filehandle is closed.

        rm -rf / will do just as it advertises, without seemi

  • tips (Score:3, Informative)

    by Coneasfast ( 690509 ) on Friday March 05, 2004 @06:32PM (#8480622)
    If you want some tips on making some good documentation, look at the freebsd handbook, that is simply excellent. you can usually find what you are looking for in there. i know i can.

    whilst in linux what i find is documentation is all around the place, man pages, howto's etc, which are helpful, but sometimes not very convenient

  • linuxquestions not just linux (Score:5, Informative)

    by bbowers ( 596225 ) on Friday March 05, 2004 @06:35PM (#8480654) Journal
    I'm a contributing member of the linuxquestions site, and I personally thing Jeremy (the owner/admin) is doing a wonderful job of keeping the site up to date and adding new things. Most recently they showed their support at linuxworld with other companies and .orgs. THe addition of the wiki will further increase what they're trying to get across. I've found threads on there that I havn't found anywhere else on google or mailing lists, and most everyhting I've needed has a solution. Responses are fast, and the people are very nice, I'd reccomend it to anyone with questions.

    Now keep in mind they don't just do linux, theres Solaris forums, Programming forums, AIX, distro forums, and many many more such as hardware forums, networking and a very nice HCL. I guess this is turning into an ad but I'm just trying to help out cause a little bit I guess. You'll find me there as the user Astro

  • linuxquestions, huh? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by slide-rule ( 153968 ) on Friday March 05, 2004 @06:37PM (#8480671)
    I dunno if the "wiki" part is anything newer than what I saw a month ago, but after jumping through several account creation / e-mail verification / etc hoops to try to post a detailed, working answer to someone else's problem (the problem and distro which happened to be the same as mine -- and for which no "good" answer had yet been provided), I kept getting denied any ability to actually post a reply to the thread. Tried for several days and gave up. I'm hoping it was a fluke... I know I need answers all the time for things, but the one time I CAN HELP and try to do so, DENIED. Blah.

  • wikipedia.org???? (Score:3, Funny)

    by bobsalt ( 575905 ) on Friday March 05, 2004 @06:40PM (#8480698)
    I went there once, took me 2 days to get out!!

    amazing site...

  • Problem-oriented documentation (Score:4, Interesting)

    by lawpoop ( 604919 ) on Friday March 05, 2004 @06:49PM (#8480765) Homepage Journal
    The problem I see with linux documentation (or any other documentation for complex stuff) is that it's usually not at the right level for me -- too high, too low, etc.

    I would like to see documentation that's prolem oriented. It would start with "How do I ...?". It would list the most basic, high level steps. Then, each of those steps is a link to its own "how do I...?". You could then drill down each step that's a problem to you, and find out how to do the step. That way you don't get stuck. Sure, it would take a long time to build, but then you have pretty complete, robust documentation.

  • wiki vs TLDP (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Trestran ( 715384 ) on Friday March 05, 2004 @06:50PM (#8480769)
    I have been using Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] for a while and one of the biggest selling point IMO is the great browsing experience. I often find myself actually surfing again by going from hyperlink to hyperlink, trying to soak up all the information, something I have stopped doing a while ago with most other webpages. There is lot of very good, indepth content on there.
    TLDP [tldp.org] is a bunch of mostly technical articles (HOWTO's, guides, FAQs and man pages) that are very usefull, but don't really form a coherent whole. It would be wonderfull to have a somewhat more encyclopedia oriented linux documentation to consult, that is updated consistently to boot. A encyclopedia aproach also alows you to cover a wide spectrum of topic, from, say, obscure technical details to general *nix design philosophies.
    However, wiki's for this type of large projects (like wikipedia) need a certain critical mass of contributors for it to, I would think. While I don't know if this project [linuxquestions.org] will be "it", I think a wiki aproach would be a great idea.

  • Why the opposition to docs or info? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by weeboo0104 ( 644849 ) on Friday March 05, 2004 @06:51PM (#8480779) Journal
    Seriously. I visited the local LUG and was appalled at the attitude some of the older members had whenever a relative newbie or younger kid asked them a question. The boilerplate answer from the "gurus"?
    "Just read the man pages".

    I tried to hit them up for a simple answer to the nodev, user and suid options in fstab and all I got was "Read the man pages".

    I wasn't looking to the answers to everything, only the differences between "user" and "nodev" options and when it is best to use them.

  • MediaWiki (Score:3, Informative)

    by teslatug ( 543527 ) on Friday March 05, 2004 @07:02PM (#8480849)
    Here is a link on MediaWiki [wikipedia.org] and one on a list of sites using MediaWiki [wikipedia.org].

    MediaWiki is GPL-ed, and more programmers are always welcomed.

  • How do you protect a wiki? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Mantorp ( 142371 ) <mantorp 'funny A' gmail.com> on Friday March 05, 2004 @07:03PM (#8480861) Homepage Journal
    From the FAQ on the site: Removing genuine work from this site is nothing short of vandalism

    How can you make sure some numbnut doesn't get rid of useful stuff?

  • The wiki won't help if distributions don't chip in (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Mr. Piddle ( 567882 ) on Friday March 05, 2004 @07:11PM (#8480928)

    One of the most frustrating things about Linux distributions is conflicting documentation and obselete and current documentation mixed into the same directories. I'll look at some documentation for packet filtering, for example, and be left totally bewildered as to which methods and software are actually current and intended for use and which ones are considered outmoded (and, afterwards, I run off and just use OpenBSD).

    It would be a great help if some of the distribution maintainers contributed to the wiki. They can say things like, "Debian 3.0 uses software X for doing Y, while Debian 4.0 uses Z, a replacement for X." Some one else can say, "Well, Fedora chose to use W for doing Y, so you have to do this this and this differently."

    Eliminating ambiguity can be, perhaps, the benefit of a "real-time" wiki.

  • While the goal is admirable, as many have pointed out here there is nothing to stop losers from "tainting" the wiki with malicious information. Instead of striving to become the primary source of Linux information, this project might instead aim to be a secondary source or repository, with links to the primary sources. A couple of advantages here:
    • The job of ensuring validity and accuracy of the information would be distributed among the experts, said experts themselves validated by the wiki maintainers.
  • I like the idea behind Wikis, but have often found that Wiki content is often out of date, or is wrong. This is particularly true with many Linux-related Wikis.

    I always thought it would be a good idea for Wiki's to have a rating system, as well as a 'freshness' system. If I search for a topic, I get several articles with different ratings. If I like an article, I give it a high rating. Likewise, bad articles receive low ratings.

    As an article ages and becomes less relevent to current technologies, it's sco

  • Um, OpenFacts? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Mike Hicks ( 244 ) * <hick0088@tc.umn.edu> on Friday March 05, 2004 @08:43PM (#8481487) Homepage Journal
    Hmm. The Germany government has been supporting OpenFacts [berlios.de] for some time. I guess I've tried to get people interested in that site, but it hasn't gotten very far (in the English version, at least -- the Germans seem to be doing well in the Deutsch version)

    The good news for the new project is that all OpenFacts material is public domain, so it's fair to cut-n-paste off that site (well, if there's anything very useful).

    Um, and how is this site run by LinuxQuestions independent, exactly? I guess I don't quite understand how that can be the case. Whatever, I guess.

  • Thoughts from someone who's done it (Score:5, Informative)

    by Plug ( 14127 ) on Friday March 05, 2004 @09:26PM (#8481698) Homepage
    I don't know how LQ's wiki will end up, but if the answers from questions posted to the forums make their way into Wiki entries and are regularly maintained, then it has potential.

    Almost two years ago, a resourceful hacker at our Waikato Linux Users Group [wlug.org.nz] set up a Wiki, and it has been a phenomenal success. We'll be surprised how often we google looking for something, and find the Wiki as the first hit!

    What did we do differently? For starters, Perry imported the man pages and howtos, meaning people could link to a man page in the Wiki just by naming it (ie fstab(5) [wlug.org.nz]). This encourages both reading man pages and editing them, marking them up to be more useful to everyone. Another point is that now you can see which pages (and other man pages) refer to a given page, an invaluable tool that man itself can't provide!

    We're thinking of dropping the HOWTOS because it's amost impossible to get changes sent up stream, and our own locally developed content tends to be better and more up to date.

    Good luck to the LQ people, but there exist a number of Wikis that have the knowledge growing nicely outside of this. If you're looking for something, come check us out. [wlug.org.nz]

  • slash + the howtos (Score:3, Interesting)

    by gregm ( 61553 ) on Saturday March 06, 2004 @01:41AM (#8483173)
    I've often thought about installing/hacking together something like slash and posting each of the howtos as "articles" or maybe each section of each howto as a sub-article. Then the howto could be discussed and kept live and up to date. After some period of time take the highest moderated posts and rewrite the howto and start over.

    Slashdot's moderation system seems to mostly work and that would be the key to success for something like this. I could never think of a good name for it and wasn't good enough to pull it off so I never got around to it. Now I could probably pull it off but don't have the time and still don't have a good name.

    G

  • wiki for source code (Score:4, Interesting)

    by axxackall ( 579006 ) on Saturday March 06, 2004 @02:22AM (#8483336) Homepage Journal
    I have a better idea about wiki: use it instead of CVS or on a top of CVS making possible for everyone to submit changes or to roll back the bad code. Mo more waiting when the maintainer has time to check it in - just do it yourself. If it works for open-sourced documents, why can't it work for open-sourced software?

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