Re: [tlug] AdBookWorkaround

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

>>>>> "Lyle" == Lyle Saxon <Lyle> writes:

    >> That's when a community will form around the issues that
    >> concern him.  (During the writing, that is, not after
    >> publication.)

    Lyle> Sounds interesting.  More details please!

If you go back to the TLUG archives ca 1998-1999, you'll see a number
of threads about a book, *Linux Nihongo Kankyo* by Hiroo Yamagata,
Craig Oda, Rob Bickel, and me.  At that time people were still
dual-booting English/Nihongo Windows and keeping separate versions of
wordprocessors, etc, and Linux was in even worse state.  How to get
Japanese input running, where to get source for kinput2 that would
build, how to enable Japanese input for Mosaic, how to grep Japanese
documents, etc, were FAQs.  But there wasn't a FAQ, so out of stuff
that we'd published on our home pages and TLUG's website and discussed
on the mailing list, we consed one up, and Hiroo sold it to O'Reilly
Japan for us (they only bought the Japanese rights, most of the English
version remained on the web for a long time, but I don't know where it
all is now---I have the CVS repository of the English draft of the
book, though).

Today, the book is just about 100% obsolete.  All that stuff is just a
matter of installing Red Hat and checking the "Japanese support" box
in the installer.  So what was important was that it provided a focus
for a bunch of people interested in the topic.  I'm sure it
contributed a lot to TLUG discussions.

Seems to me that's what you need, is a focus to attract more people to
discussing and working on the issues you have run into.

How to get the ball rolling?  Dunno, but one possibility would be to
start up a "Linux Userspace FAQ" with the questions you've had about
getting this that and the other thing set up, and kernel questions
strictly forbidden.<wink>

You could rip off Rick Moen (http://www.linuxmafia.com/~rick/faq/,
IIRC) and rewrite in polite terms from the "really trying" newbie's
point of view.  That in itself would be new, I think---all those FAQs,
and there are dozens of them, tend to be written from the
guru-talking-down-to-newbie point of view, and of course they're more
or less supercilious.

Or you could do a "Poor Man's Linux FAQ" focused on how to deal with
less than the latest and greatest hardware, etc.

Please note that I'm not poking fun at you for the sake of doing so;
it's just the humorous "hook" to attract attention.  For it to work,
you need to do it your own style, of course.  Nor do I really think
any of those ideas would would fly as is, but something in there might
be useful and/or will click with something that would come naturally
to you.

You probably could get it posted on the TLUG server.

-- 
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences     http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
University of Tsukuba                    Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
               Ask not how you can "do" free software business;
              ask what your business can "do for" free software.