Elements of Style and the documentation-guide
by Paul W. Frields
After spending the last several days doing markup on a syntactically and
grammatically, er, "challenged" tutorial, I found myself in need of the
solace of Strunk and White's "The Elements of Style," if only to remind
myself that good writing does indeed exist outside my imagination. I
noticed during my Web search that EoS was released some years ago into
the public domain, and can be found in a variety of formats, although
DocBook XML was not one of these as far as I can tell.
I realize that "public domain" != "FDL," and therefore am wondering if
anyone out there has sufficient expertise to address the extent to which
EoS might be included in the documentation-guide. It would be a handy
reference for contributors, so they might acquaint themselves with the
way to write concisely before beginning a tutorial from scratch. It also
would help editors (myself included) to make the right changes when
presented with documentation that has been tortured and abused before a
handoff. :-)
In addition, or as an alternative, to EoS, perhaps there should be some
guidelines that have been useful to the Red Hat staff in preparing their
official RHL and RHEL documentation over the years. I have found those
guides consistently clear, concise, and informative, and I would hope
that FDP products would be of similar quality. By comparison, a lot of
the documentation on the Web is poorly written, and often lapses into
informalities, colloquialism, unhelpful jargon, and vague generalities.
On the other hand, in many cases those materials will form the basis for
future FDP work, so FDP content guidelines might be very useful as time
goes on.
(In the event that EoS can be included in the documentation-guide, I
will volunteer to do markup, since I brought up the issue. I doubt it
will be very difficult in any case, given that it's dominated by
non-technical matter.)
--
Paul W. Frields, RHCE
18 years, 11 months
Bandwidth
by redwire@therockmere.com
Please provide Specs on Server Space, Bandwidth and usage. I maybe able to
help.
Brad
P.S. Sorry, this maybe out of thread. I have the Fedora list digested to me.
18 years, 11 months
Permission Denied
by redwire@therockmere.com
I got into the CVS to checkout the docs. But, I keep getting this error::
cvs server: warning: cannot write to history file
/usr/local/CVS/CVSROOT/history
I made a folder CVSROOT and a file history, both with 777 permissions.
Any suggestions? I'm walking back thru the docs, but would apprecitate any
suggestions for resolution.
thanks...Brad
18 years, 11 months
eos-guide-en-0.1
by Paul W. Frields
You can find the tarball for this document, if interested, at:
http://docs.frields.org/
I've formatted it as a DocBook XML book rather than an article since I
felt the size and derivation warranted that treatment. I wrote a small,
probably self-indulgent, and definitely unnecessary foreword, addressing
the purpose of the book, and the changes that will be made. Note the
foreword talks about them in the past tense, whereas I haven't actually
started the content portion yet. I intend to change the content to
include examples from real Linux documentation to make the book more
on-point with the FDP.
I'm considering possibly removing the minor personalization I've done,
and "freezing" that copy for public distribution, also under the FDL,
with a "pristine" text of the 1918 edition. This is only slightly
complicated by the fact that before I came up with this idea, I made
three or four very minor alterations in the text to correct outdated
usage. Nevertheless, I can probably locate those portions and return
them to their original state in a few hours of proofreading.
I still have a sticky situation, though, which I have not been able to
fully address, which is the treatment of the section numbering. I chose
to assign the chapters roman numeral labels (I, II...) to match the
original, and used <simplesect> sections so that I could manually number
the rules as in the original text, with the numbering persisting across
chapters, rather than mucking with awkward labeling like "III.2" caused
by the chapter labels and the automatic formatting from (I assume) the
various XSL and other widgets. (Don't shoot me please, I'm not a
doc-tools expert, I just use 'em.) If anyone has comments, let me know,
even if it's just to agree with the method I used.
I tried to get the whole book as consistent as possible. At this point
I've worked on it most of the day (and night) Friday and all day today,
and have decided to take the day off tomorrow... at least until the bug
hits again. Enjoy!
--
Paul W. Frields, RHCE
18 years, 11 months
Mini-ITX
by Daniel Gorst
Hello everyone,
I've just installed Fedora (core 1) on a Via EPIA-M6000 motherboard with
the C3 processor but I'm having difficulty installing the onboard
graphics drivers supplied on the drivers disk. Using the VESA standard
works but very slowly :(
I would be interested to hear if anyone's had any joy installing the
drivers on the same motherboard and if so where they found them.
Thanks in advance,
Dan
18 years, 11 months
Net-Snmp "no page line in /proc/stat"
by VCI Gold Support
Noticed that when running snmpd we get a message in the logs of no
page/swap line in /proc/stat. Checked and there is none the error is
correct. Does anyone know if this is an issue with kernel 2.6? Is it
normal and safe to run like this? Also the Fedora page list the CPU
requirements as AMD64 and Intel 64 processors , is this correct? Another
site list compatibility with all Pentium processors, just wondering if
there were any known issues.
--
Chris Moss
18 years, 11 months
file retreival syntax
by redwire@therockmere.com
I've logged into the CVS to poke around and get the xml stylesheets. But,
what is my syntax for d'l of the files. I don't check them out, correct?.
Thanks,
Brad
18 years, 11 months
Instal Fedora on a osx Apple G4 server.
by Eelco Alosery
Hello,
I have a smal webhosting company and for now i rent te servers running
the hosted main and websites.
But I want to have my own servers and learn to manage them.
Now i know that the Apple osx server software can handel this all, but
i waant to use the online control panels form ENSIM.
And that can only be instaled on fedora or red hat linux.
But I need this ENSIM sotware becose I already use this on my rental
servers.
So this is wy i want to instal fedora on a Apple G4 Xserver or a G5
Xserver.
Is there some person who can gif me the information where to start from.
And it wil even be better if that person gan tell it to me in dutch.
Becose i'm from the netherlands :-)
I'm a total newbe on instalin unix/linux from scratsh but i realy want
to learn it.
Thanx,
Eelco Alosery
18 years, 11 months
DocBook via Windows
by redwire@therockmere.com
Thanks for the heads up on the Cygwin and getting the DocBook files.
I have putty on my WinBox and will connect with the link you provided. I'm
looking to use Cygwin\NTEmacs for the XML markup and then once my project
was complete to port it to my Fedora Server to parse the final DocBook.
I'm working on my CVS cmds and am also working on a tutorial for migration
from RH [8 or 9] to FC [1 or 2] via YUM. It isn't that long, but is good
for me to cut my teeth on.
Thanks,
Brad
18 years, 11 months
unsubscribe?
by jos preeker
I tried to unsubscribe a few times (click link on bottom of email, login and
unsubscribe) and it said it'd send me a confirmation email. But it never
did. Can anyone help me unsubscribe?
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18 years, 11 months