November 26th, 2009 |
Published in
Ubuntu
Seriously, is removing Gimp from a default install of Ubuntu that bad? Bad enough for you to leave Ubuntu for some other distribution? I have been reading blog posts, news sites, blog comments, IRC, Twitter, and Identi.ca, and what I am seeing simply amazes me. Thus far, the popular topic to these complaints is that Ubuntu is making the desktop even dumber. So, if Ubuntu is making the desktop dumber, I guess in the past it has made many lazier? I mean, installing Gimp isn’t a big deal. I am a Kubuntu user, and KDE user of other distros, and none off the top of my head include Gimp. Just now, I had to reinstall my system because my hard drive blew up. In just over a minute I had Gimp, the Plugin Repo, and Inkscape installed. And for you all who are going crazy over the decision, just know that the developers of Gimp agree with the decision:
“That is pretty much in-line with our product vision. GIMP is a high-end
application for professionals. It is not the tool that you would advise
every user to use for their casual photo editing. And as far as I
understand this, it’s not that GIMP would not be available for Ubuntu
users. It’s simply not installed by default.
Sven”
HERE is a comment from the Gimp world supporting it, HERE is another, and another. I use Zsh, Ubuntu doesn’t ship that by default, I am going to go take a turkey hostage now!
Simmah down nah! It isn’t the end of the world. When Ubuntu switches to KDE in 2012, then it will be the end of the world!
November 23rd, 2009 |
Published in
Documentation, Kubuntu, Tutorial, Ubuntu
So, you keep hearing me talk about contributing to Kubuntu documentation, and you see that I say it would be nice for you to have some DocBook/XML experience. Many people want to help, but they don’t have that experience. In most cases, the people interested at least understand HTML or some other markup language a little bit. If you can understand that, then you can easily understand DocBook/XML the way we use it for Kubuntu documentation. DocBook/XML has a lot of tags that one can use, however we only use a very small subset of those tags with our documentation. Just an idea of the main tags we use from DocBook/XML are:
- <sect1>
- <sect2> – sometimes
- <title>
- <para>
- <ulink>
- <example> – sometimes
- <mediaobject> – only for screenshots
- <imageobject> – only for screenshots
- <imagedata> – only for screenshots
- <acronym> – sometimes
- <guibutton> – sometimes
There might be a few more, but these are the ones that pop into my head. For instance, when you are trying to let the reader know to open up an application via the menu, there is a tag called <menuchoice>. We have an entities file that contains all of the menu stuff, so you wouldn’t even need to use that tag, as you would call it in the document you are working in. Example: Say you are trying to tell the user how to open Amarok, you would enter &menuamarok;. Easy!
Here is an HTML example, lets say, Hello World 
<html>
<head>
<title>Hello, World!</title>
</head>
<body>
<p>Hello, World!</p>
</body>
</html>
The html, head, and title, are already taken care for you with the template, so you just need to do the part in between the <p> and </p>. So in DocBook/XML, that would look:
<para>Hello, World!</para>
Easy. Typically with HTML, when you are trying to show a section or make a section stand out, you might use <h1> to make the title stand out. Well in DocBook/XML there are a few more lines, but still easy to do:
HTML:
<h1>This is the title of the section</h1>
<p>This is a paragraph in the section.</p>
<p>This is another paragraph in the section.</p>
DocBook/XML:
<sect1 id="intro">
<title>This is the title of the section</title>
<para>This is a paragraph in the section.</para>
<para>This is another paragraph in the section.</para>
</sect1>
If you are looking for a little bit more information concerning documentation in the Ubuntu world, take a look at the Documentation Team Wiki Page. There is also a bit of information on how we use Bazaar when working with documentation as well. To get an idea of how we use DocBook/XML with Kubuntu documentation, take a look at the old Jaunty Documentation for Kubuntu. Under the docs/ directory you will find the topics covered. And then under the topic, in the C/ folder is the XML markup for that topic. There is obviously a bit more DocBook/XML markup in our documentation, but the header portion and the layout is already completed in a template, so all one would need to do is fill in the space and create new sections.
If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to stop by the Ubuntu Documentation IRC channel on Freenode in #ubuntu-doc and ask away. We also have a mailing list where you can ask questions and communicate via email to other documentation people.
November 22nd, 2009 |
Published in
Documentation, Kubuntu
Here is the email I sent to the Ubuntu Documenation Project’s mailing list today:
Currently we over in the Kubuntu world are completely rewriting the system
documentation. Why you ask? Because the old documentation was just that,
old. It contained information from the KDE 3.5 days. The reason for this is
because for the past 4 years, there have only been 2 of us working on the
documentation, and for the past 2 years, we both have been super busy with
our personal life. We will have a similar structure/layout as previous
releases in regards to the fake topic-based help, however the content needs
to be totally rewritten.
Because of this, we are looking for people who have the following
experiences:
1) You run Kubuntu and are familiar with its applications
2) You can read and write English
3) DocBook/XML experience would be nice
4) Understand how to use Bazaar
I have created a quick todo list [1] where we can track who is working on
what. There is no time line set in stone, however I would like to have a
solid documentation base by the end of the year. Because we are rewriting
the documentation from scratch, we need to have this solid base in place so
we can start translations. I would love to have all topics with a status of
NEEDS REVIEW by the end of the year.
If you have any questions or would like to help, please feel free to reply
to this mail or find me on IRC (#kubuntu-devel and #ubuntu-docs). Thanks!
[1] https://wiki.kubuntu.org/Kubuntu/Documentation/Lucid/Todo
Any and hell help would be greatly appreciated right now. Thanks!
