notes from the mousepad

This site lists who they’ve identified as the top 50 technical writers on the web, which I stumbled upon via a link from Scott Nesbitt’s blog.  While this list will certainly provide me with additional documentation resources, I notice a dearth of open-source documentation names in that list.  No Shaun McCance, no Emma Jane Hogbin, [...]

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Greetings!  I hope everyone has been enjoying their summers, and that things are progressing along smoothly with the 9.10 release cycle.  I want to share a brief note regarding Xfce documentation licensing with the hopes that others could provide some additional points for us to consider.
Before I do that, though, let me pause to reflect [...]

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Cody Somerville has been writing quite a bit lately about what’s going on with Xubuntu, focusing a lot on the strategy document and some technical goals for the next release, but we also have a couple of other things in the works – some items that are kind of on the fringes of the distro, [...]

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The Xubuntu documentation for 8.04 is done, and the doc-centered folks are now working on updating the wiki.  There are still quite a few holes in it for now, but we’re working fairly quickly.  I like the new menu bar.  It makes it easy to get around.
Also, I know it’s not much notice, but tomorrow [...]

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Fellow Chicagolander, nixternal, provided the Ubuntu-Chicago local community team with a few links to packaging-related articles that are available from some Debian and Kubuntu websites:
1) http://www.debian.org/doc/devel-manuals#policy
2) http://www.debian.org/doc/devel-manuals#devref
3) http://www.debian.org/doc/devel-manuals#maint-guide
4) https://wiki.kubuntu.org/PackagingGuide
5) https://wiki.kubuntu.org/PbuilderHowto
6) https://wiki.kubuntu.org/PackagingGuide/Lists/DocumentationResources
He sent them out to the mailing list in advance of a packaging session that’s being held this Sunday at the [...]

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Both this article and this article note how Ubuntu’s documentation needs to be better than it is. The first article describes (in the last point on the second page) that we should do more content scraping from the unofficial documentation (with permission) to improve our docs. We receive lots of requests for mentorship, [...]

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The Ubuntu documentation team has recently migrated all flavors of *Ubuntu documentation from Subversion over to Bazaar.  There are now separate branch repositories for each of the flavors, and instructions on how to download the repositories (and how to submit your changes) are up on the Ubuntu wiki.  Thanks to Matthew East and a few [...]

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After thinking things through for a while, I finally got around to making a few updates to j1m.net. Previously I had everything over on j1m.net/chi-ubuntu, but I’m moving my posting activities over to the root page of my site. I’m still working on Xubuntu (quite a bit), and I’m still a member of [...]

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Things have been pretty hectic lately. It seems like there’s always too much to do in Chicago in the summertime. I’m excited about what is in store, though. Freddy Martinez and I have been working on Xubuntu documentation, basing it largely off of Ubuntu’s Feisty documentation, and we have to submit our first set of [...]

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Tonight I went to a couple of Linux-related events after work, and I’m glad I made it out. I first went to an initial set-up meeting for a Chicago Gnome user group. We had some informal discussions about Gnome, and what a Gnome user group might be and do in the city.
Kevin is [...]

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