Ubuntu manual

AbOUT

The Ubuntu Manual Project is an open source internationally collaborative community project that is intended to create a beginners manual for Ubuntu. It is neither endorsed or supported by Canonical Ltd, the company behind Ubuntu.

History

The project was founded at the end of 2009 by Benjamin Humphrey, who felt there was no documentation available that was written as an introduction for complete beginners, available free of charge, kept up to date and released in sync with Ubuntu, and community based. Humphrey hosted the rough draft of the introductory chapters which he had written on Launchpad on 23 December 2009and asked for volunteer contributors on the Ubuntu Forums, Planet Ubuntu and several blogs.

It wasn't long before the team had hundreds of members and contributors from all over the world working on a LaTeX document, 150 pages in total length with a complete glossary and index, available in 47 different languages and with thousands of localized screenshots.

Publications

Currently, the Ubuntu Manual Team is working on Getting Started with Ubuntu 10.04, a complete beginners manual for Ubuntu, featuring comprehensive guides, How Tos and information that a user might need after first installing Ubuntu. The team works with the assumption that their reader has never heard of Ubuntu or Linux before. There has been an Alpha release (February 10th, 2010 - Version 0.3) and the final version is scheduled for release on April 29th 2010, to coincide with the release of Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx.

The Manual is written in LaTeX using TexLive 2009, and is hosted on Launchpad.net. It will be released as a PDF and a supporting website is also being created at the URL http://ubuntu-manual.org.

Future Plans

There are plans to increase the project size to cover a Kubuntu manual, a Xubuntu manual and possibly an Ubuntu Developers Manual in the future, as well as providing a topic-based online HTML5 version with video tutorials and detailed step by step instructions. The team is also working on collaboration with the Ubuntu Community Learning Project and the Ubuntu Documentation Team and are hoping for inclusion on the Ubuntu 10.10 CD.

License

The manual is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike (CC-BY-SA).

External Links

1 Project website