downloadable documentation for offline use

[BobBagwill]

I was trying to get TC working on an old laptop and found myself bouncing back and forth between TC and Puppy because I couldn't get the wifi working, and didn't have another computer handy.  It would be useful if:

1) the wiki was very complete  and
2) the wiki content was downloadable for offline use 

How about dumping the wiki and creating a downloadable extension? (I can't post the link to offline dokuwiki)
Of course, number one would require that wiki gnomes copy more of the useful info from the forums to the wiki.
The forums aren't very useful when you're having trouble getting networking working.  Thanks.

[Rich]

Hi BobBagwill
You could try using  File->Save As  in your browser to save individual web pages.

[hiro]

I don't think the wiki is very complete yet so what might be more useful for your regular linux problem is downloading man pages for later offline use, either manually or as extensions.

I still often ssh to my old debian machine when I want to look up some strange verbose command line options.

[breakstuff]

Um, while your at it just download the whole Internet to your hard drive?

[Guy]

All people contributing to Tinycore are volunteers.

The top priority is developing Tinycore and apps. A number of people are putting a lot of time and effort into that.

Anybody can contribute to the wiki, and many people have.

But like you say, it is incomplete and not up to date.

All contributions are appreciated. Anyone who has a good understanding and the time, is encouraged to contribute.

There is the possibility of making a help extension in the future. But the documentation should be up to date, complete, and to a professional standard first.

So please, use Tinycore, develop a good understanding, then contribute.

[hiro]

The good thing about tinycorelinux is that it's code is so easy to find and understand that I never have to use the wiki at all.

If what I'm trying to understand is not in the tc scripts it's probably documented in the sources of the specific application, busybox or the kernel.
The core doesn't need a lot of words

An other way of seeing things

[hiro]

We could include or provide an extension with the documentation found on the main web site, because I agree with the original idea of having everything in one place for offline use.

[beerstein]

Hi: I tried once to download the TC wiki. But I gave up because there was too much "junk" comming down with the
pages which matters.
Is there a way to wget a clean image for offline use?

[hiro]

What if you only download the pages linked from http://wiki.tinycorelinux.net/wiki:start ? For this you would need set the depth to 1 IIRC.

[BobBagwill]

Although there doesn't seem to a be a great groundswell of support for creating an extension based on the content of the wiki, I would still find offline documentation useful. Downloading individual pages or spidering the wiki would be less than optimal.  Some other options would be:

1) install the bookcreator plugin, which allows you to create a PDF book from the wiki.
2) allow access to the output of a backup plugin or script
3) allow rsyncd access to data/pages/

I didn't see an admin listed for the wiki (on the wiki).  Who would I ask about implementing something?  Thanks.

[Lee]

FWIW, I think the idea of a documentation extension is great.  It wold be a moving target, so the extension maintainer would have a daunting task to keep it anywhere close to current - might be hard to find someone who is both willing and able to take it on.

But I'll bet it would be a very popular download.

What if a few motivated users were to post individual documentation (as extensions for easy retrieval) of their own use of TC?  Especially if well indexed these might be useful and especially in a collection.  In fact, if the indexing were done in a standardized way, a separate aggregating app might be made to pull together the indexes.  Just thinking aloud here...

[curaga]

gutmensch is our primary wiki admin right now.

[hiro]

Currently all the graphical (tinycore) part is documented quite extensively and even with additional stuff like screenshots and work-through instructions. The base stuff is more or less "just look at the code".

We should create at least some kind of overview about which scripts are called and when in the boot process, then use this to push people to search in there with their favorite text editor.

[Guy]

Before making downloadable documentation, make sure it is up to date. Much of the existing documentation is not up to date. So update it first.

If anyone is willing, has a good understanding of Tinycore, the ability and the time, I am sure it would be appreciated.

If a number of people want to contribute, that would be even better.

It does not need to include everything in the wiki, but would be ideal if it included all of the basics.

Then it will need to be maintained - that is updated for each new release of Tinycore.

[BobBagwill]

It's easiest to keep documentation up-to-date if it's all in one place.  If the wiki is the canonical source, and you generate the documentation from the wiki, keeping the extension fresh is no extra work.  If the entire wiki isn't suitable for a manual, you could create a namespace for it.

In reply to beerstein: appending ?do=export_raw gets you the raw markup.