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

• Daniel Nofftz's announced that his Athlon Powersaving HOWTO is ready for review.

2.1. HOWTOs

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

• Anders Jensen-Urstad supplies us with v1.5 of the Game Server HOWTO and Peter Jay Salzman mailed v0.9.22 of the The Linux Gamers' HOWTO.

• Alavoor Vasudevan sent in yet another update for the Kernel HOWTO, which is now at v5.7. He also moved the Vim Color Editor HOW-TO to DocBook.

• The Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide v1.8, by Mendel Cooper.

• Also by Peter Salzman: the Debian Jigdo mini-HOWTO.

• Skip Rye worked on v1.8 of the Linux Optical Disk HOWTO.

• Svetoslav Slavtchev, one of the new TLDP authors, send in the first update to the XFree Local Multi-User HOWTO.

• Saqib Ali sent in the DocBook XML/SGML Processing Using OpenJade HOWTO, v2.2.5.

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.