Alon Swartz's picture

For a while now I've been thinking how we can improve appliance documentation, or even take it one step further and create a mini-knowledge base, describing what can be achieved with appliance X, how to get started, known gotcha's, tips, tweaks as well as success stories (for inspiration).

The idea I came up with is: The appliance spotlight.

A member of the community would "run" the spotlight for its duration (1 week), and kick it off with a tutorial / success story / screencast.

During the spotlight we'd request others pitch in:

  • submit tutorials, their own success stories, links to useful resources
  • deploy and test the appliance to discover bugs and provide feedback/ideas for the next release

I'm looking for feedback on the idea in general, ideas for spotlights you would like to see, and especially for spotlights you would like to run.

Anything goes, I'm open to suggestions...

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Jeremy Davis's picture

I think it definately has merit. IMO documentation is where TKL falls down so this is a novel way to help address this situation. As you suggest it may even help find bugs, potential improvements and ideas for extentions or perhaps even new appliances.

I say go for it, but as you may have noticed I haven't been on quite as much as usual lately, been very busy out in the 'real world'. So we'll have to wait and see how much I will be able to contribute.

Don Sanderson's picture

been on as much, I keep hoping you'll jump in and answer posts before I'm forced to risk making a fool of myself! wink

But seriously though:

Docs, walkthroughs and examples are desperately needed here. I've been too impressed with TurnKey to risk offending anyone by voicing my opinion so far.

I'm pretty new here myself.

Now that I see it's a widespread opinion I will join in.

We seem to have a very diverse following here, some have never seen, let alone installed, Linux before, or S3, or EC2. Some don't seem to know just what an 'appliance' really is and some don't see the full implication of tklbam-backup. Or the concept of 'naughty places'. Or DNS, domains, hosting, etc.

I would be willing to help out in documenting some of  these general areas and then expand on these as I myself learn more about TurnKey and the Appliances specifically.

I am NOT a coder or an 'expert' in Linux but after several hundred Linux installs, extensive work on a 'derivitive' (PCLinuxOS Business Edition or BEL) and a LOT of troubleshooting along with a couple of RHEL courses I've become pretty good at putting info in a form readable by 'mere mortals'.

Let me know what it is you'd like me to do and I'll give it my best shot.

Adrian Moya's picture

In order to see what's comming ahead so we can prepare something to share on the spotlight week. I mean something like: 

Next month's spotlight:

Week1: Wordpress

Week2: Drupal

Week3: Redmine

And so on. It's just because one week is a short period of time to wrap up a tutorial/screencast/post. I have lots of things in the form of notes waiting for some day to clean up and attach maybe some screenshots. 

Anyway, it seems like a nice idea. 

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