Lessons for Lizards (LfL) is a community cookbook-style book project for the openSUSE distribution licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL). It is planned to ship this book with upcoming openSUSE releases on an equal footing with internally produced documentation. Lessons for Lizards covers more specific or exotic topics than the internally produced manuals, such as
One aim of the LfL project is to enable the openSUSE community to actively participate in the openSUSE documentation. The other aim is to provide a cookbook for beginners and experts with step-by-step recipes and hands-on guides on topics, not covered in the present documenation. The book should be easy to understand and easy to write. In order to enable this goal, Novell provides a technical environment, software and support.
At present, users can get all sorts of documentation on Linux and openSUSE in particular, ranging from HOWTOs to expert books. However, the documentation team feels the need for a book in cookbook style with step-by-step instructions, because such a guide is hard to find. From our own experience with existing documentation in cookbook-style, we know that such books are most helpful when being in need for hands-on solutions.
All materials in this project are licensed under GNU Free Documentation License.
12/18/2006: We have created the necessary infrastructure with some example documents. However, we need you to write articles about your itching problems to make LfL a real success.
Our sources, released under the GFDL, are available on openSUSE.org. You can send us patches (via the opensuse-doc mailing list) or use Bugzilla to report errors and improvements.
Subscribe to <opensuse-doc@opensuse.org>. The friendly people on this list will
answer your questions.
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Use the LFL Quickstart for a short introduction.
We suggest the following procedure:
Why not? ;-)
Write once, publish anywhere. This is the paradigma of creating documents in XML and especially in DocBook. With the help of DocBook you write your text in a format-independent way. Applying a stylesheet to your file creates HTML, PDF or any other format that is supported.
DocBook is also the de-facto standard for writing documentation. The Linux documentation project, KDE, GNOME, Samba,…,—all these projects use DocBook. If you “learn” DocBook, you can use your experience in other projects as well—no need to get used to something completely new.
Actually, you don't have to “learn” DocBook inside out—we provide an easy to fill in XML template and offer examples ready to be used by cut and paste. Whatsmore, our mechanic makes it also very easy to validate your documents. In case of errors, the validator offers detailed error reports. Even more help is available within our Style Guide. Of course, you can also find a lot of tutorials in the Internet. The main sources for DocBook are www.docbook.org and [1].
Yes. Although we prefer DocBook XML you can write your initial text in ASCII. We will help you to convert it to DocBook/XML, which will make it much easier for you to do future work in DocBook/XML. Please ask on the opensuse-doc mailinglist.
As lang as FOP only issues warnings, you can savely ignore them.
You probably have a wrong FOP and/or Java version installed. Please see the Quickstart for more information.
Please be patient. Depending on your hardware, building a PDF can take a long time. You may check with top in another shell—while the message above is listed, a java process runs.
© 2008 Novell, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
