Documentation Team

From openSUSE

We are the infamous Doku-Wichtl, a group of dedicated people writing and maintaining the openSUSE/SUSE Linux manuals. We collect input from all kinds of sources available to us, we even suck knowledge out of the developers' brains and turn it into something intelligible.You may have heard that the most dangerous animal in the universe is a developer with a screwdriver. You are mistaken -- it's a coding Doku-Wichtl! ;)

Where to get our Manuals

Our manuals are shipped with each openSUSE version and are also available for download. For example, find HTML and PDF versions of the openSUSE 11.2 manuals on http://www.novell.com/documentation/opensuse112/ or look for older versions of the openSUSE/SUSE Linux manuals on http://www.novell.com/documentation/. You can also access HTML versions of our manuals in your installed openSUSE system under /usr/share/doc/manual (or in the Help Centers of your KDE or GNOME desktop). The preface of each manual lists which other manuals are available on openSUSE. For information where to find the manuals on your installation media, refer to the release notes.

To create and publish our manuals, we use open source tools (with one exception: the commercial FO formatter XEP from RenderX): The manuals are written in XML, using the Novdoc DTD, a subset of DocBook (see http://www.docbook.org). The XML source files are validated by xmllint, processed by xsltproc, and converted into XSL-FO using a customized version of Norman Walsh's stylesheets. The final PDF is formatted through XEP from RenderX.

Since SUSE Linux 10.1, we also ship the XML source files of our manuals. Find them in the opensuse-manual_LANGUAGE package on the installation media (or download it from http://download.opensuse.org/source/distribution/11.2/repo/oss/suse/src/). Unpack the .src.rpm and find the XML files in several tarballs (*tar.bz2) which you can unpack to get the source files for the respective manual.

susedoc package

The documentation environment we use to create and publish our manuals is developed and maintained by us. It is also available as susedoc*.rpm package (see also http://developer.novell.com/wiki/index.php/Lfl/susedoc) and shipped with the openSUSE distro. Install and use it, if you like (it also works with FOP instead of XEP) :).

Get the latest susedoc*.rpm version from the openSUSE Build Service (it is located under YOUR_openSUSE_VERSION/no arch/).

Lessons For Lizards

If you would like to contribute to the openSUSE documentation, there are several ways to do so. Lessons for Lizards (LfL) is a community cookbook-style book project for the openSUSE distribution licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL). The book is shipped with 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:

Experimental software
Third party drivers
Complex setups (such as a router for the home network)

Find detailed information (Quick Start, FAQs, How To Contribute, etc.) at http://developer.novell.com/wiki/index.php/Lessons_for_Lizards. Or talk to us at the opensuse-doc mailing list.

Feedback

Now, if you don't want to write for us or let us suck your brains out ;), there are still things you can do to support your SUSE Doku-Wichtl:

File a bug report if you find any problems in the manuals (how to report bugs).
Use the user comment feature in the online (HTML) version of our manuals at http://www.novell.com/documentation/. Each HTML page of our manuals provides an Add Feedback entry where you can let us know about any issues you found with the manuals.
Subscribe to the opensuse-doc mailing list and tell us what we can do better and maybe how. Provide feedback about the susedoc documentation system and help us to ameliorate it.

Or simply tell us that you think our manuals are the most fascinating pieces of world literature. ;)

Who we are

Juergen Weigert (not an educated Doc-Wichtl)
keichwa (Karl Eichwalder)
Thomas Schraitle
Jakub Friedl
Tanja Roth (People of openSUSE)
Fsundermeyer (Frank Sundermeyer)
Florian Nadge
Mike Bowling
Tomaz Bazant
Björn Geuken (trainee)

Ex-Team-Members

Tom Rölz
jjaeger1 (Jana Jaeger)
azouhr (Berthold Gunreben)
Christian Schneemann (trainee)
Jan Löser (trainee)
Matthias Weckbecker (trainee)