Episode: 724
Title: HPR0724: Full Circle Podcast: Ubuntu Manual Project
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0724/hpr0724.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 01:31:00

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The Fold Circle Podcast on Hacker Public Radio.
This episode, the Ubuntu Manual Project.
Hello World and welcome to Fold Circle Podcast on Hacker Public Radio.
In this episode, it's the interview we ran last summer with Benjamin Humphrey, co-founder
and editor of The Ubuntu Manual Project.
The Fold Circle Podcast is the companion to Fold Circle magazine, the independent magazine
for the Ubuntu community.
Find us at Fold Circle magazine.org forward slash podcast.
So our next guest is Mr. Benjamin Humphrey, all the way from Christchurch New Zealand,
who's going to talk to us about the Ubuntu Manual Project. Good morning, Benjamin.
Good day, how's it going?
The Ubuntu Manual, much discussed over years, something that's been much needed and finally
there's a project that's going to deliver on one and just to start off with what's your
role within the project.
Basically, I suppose I try and do as much as I can across most of the areas, but I think
I started a few months ago and since then I've just sort of taken on the role of team lead
basically.
I've also written the prologue and chapter one.
I do a bit of editing, design the website, a whole bunch of other things like that.
Currently, how big a team are we talking about to produce this thing?
It's probably in a launch bed team, I think we have something like 300 people.
Out of a team, I think we've got about a dozen people who are always on IRC, basically
working on it pretty much like 20 hours a week.
And then there's another maybe 50 or 60 people who sort of come and gone and done all sorts
of different things.
And then there's a good 80 to 100 people translating it sort of part time as they come across
strings and things like that.
So it's quite a large project for the duration that it's been around considering it was
non-existent just before Christmas.
That's quite a bit of momentum.
You've managed to build up there in a very short space of time, which is excellent.
Let's step back to basics.
What is the intended aim of the Ubuntu manual project?
I think what we're trying to do is develop a consistent and up-to-date source of information
for basically all kinds of people who want to learn a bunch of new to it from either
coming from Windows or from Mac or people who are completely new to computers.
So with every six months there's going to be a newer version that will cover all of
the new features and changes present in each release of Ubuntu.
And currently the format of the draft version that's up on the site is a standard PDF.
Is that your main output format?
Yeah.
Our aim is to have it available in at least 25 to 30 languages.
And in terms of formats, at the moment we're working on the PDF version, but in the future
we have planned an HTML5 version to be hosted online with video tutorials and stuff like
that, where we can sort of make it more interactive.
We've also got plans to release this version through Lulu.com, which is basically we're
going to, we're looking at costs and things now, it's obviously still, it's all going
to be free to download and all that sort of stuff.
And all you do if you wanted to buy the printed version would be to pay for the printing
costs.
And at the moment I think you'll be able to get it for about $6 US dollars for just a
black and white paperback version through Lulu.com, a plus shipping I think, but so in terms
of different formats, we're trying to cover basically all types of people who might want
to purchase it as a book or download it as a PDF or view it on the internet as an HTML5.
And now the big question with this is how are you going to keep this thing up to date?
Having been in publishing, that was the thing that fascinated me because of the frequency
with which not only Ubuntu itself changes, but the various components within it change
and go through various versions.
The way we've sort of managed to overcome the boredom, if you will, is to make our project
really exciting and feature packed and we have a very fast, high-paced development schedule
or we just decide to do something and we do it.
So for example, QuickShot, we needed all these screenshots and so we decided to create
a profile and application for it and so we did that.
And that only took a few weeks.
And so I think we also combine use of a website, a Facebook page, Twitter, where we're
always sort of open to the public for everybody to see us, you know, are very visible because
of that we've managed to get a hell of a lot of people.
But in terms of keeping it up to date, I think it's going to be interesting to see how
many people are actually willing to jump in and just sort of change little bits coming
up to the next release.
I think now that we've got all of our infrastructure in place, we're definitely going to be in
a bit of position for 10.10 Maverick.
We should be able to look at some new, like new publications so we don't want to stop
with just Ubuntu, you know, we want to have manuals available in the series for all
of the distributions.
We're just going to judge what sort of interest we get after this first release as to whether
we'll start working on maybe like a Kubuntu manual or something like that for Maverick.
So it's worth saying that the current draft version that you've got is for the main Ubuntu
version and it's describing the NomDesk top and the other variants at the moment aren't
catered for.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So really we need to evangelize for the Kubuntu, Zubuntu and any other version to jump
on board and start building for their distro choice.
Well, absolutely.
We're definitely interested in people wanting to come along and help out with that sort
of stuff.
I had a person a few weeks ago, I suggested an idea to me that was the sound of awesome,
which would be Ubuntu Developers Manual.
With all this opportunistic developer stuff going on, I don't know if you followed Planet
or Planet or Ubuntu, but John O'Bacon's really pushing this opportunistic developer thing
and I thought, this could just come along and suggested, why don't you do a developer's
manual that covers like a bizarre launchpad, ground control, all that sort of stuff.
And quickly, which is the development framework to get everything working nicely with Python
applications and glad.
And that's just what, why don't you do that?
And I thought it was a fantastic idea, so that's definitely something we'll be looking
out to.
That would be a great help up to all of those people that you see on the forums going,
I do a bit of programming.
How do I contribute?
I think a developer's manual really would give everybody a step up, I think.
Yeah, absolutely.
The frequency of update, I think we've picked up that you're planning to synchronize with
the major version update, so we've got the first edition, if you like, coming up to synchronize
with 10 or 4 Lucid, and you've just alluded to another major release at 1010.
What about any interim updates, do you have a schedule for that, or is it on a needs
must basis?
So what we've decided to do, for 10.04, we're going to have 10.04 first edition,
which will be released on the 29th of April, to coincide with Lucid.
And then we're going to, just for this release at the moment, we're going to release a second
edition for 10.04 in June or July, and the reason behind that is that, and I think what
we're going to do is we've branched the main branch into three different things.
So we've got the current release, which is just the first edition for 10.04, and then
after that, we're going to be working on two different ones.
We're going to be working on the second edition for 10.04, which will be mainly bug fixing.
And we have an aim of having 100% absolutely perfect with no spelling mistakes, no missed
commas or apostrophes or anything, just 100% error free.
And that's what we want to aim for for the second edition for Lucid.
And then we'll also be working on the one for 10.04, but after that, I think we're
just going to look at just having one release for each release of Ubuntu every six months.
So this is just sort of an interim type thing that we've done because we've only just started
a project and we've come across issues.
It's not going to be 100% for the first edition, so that's why we want to have it released
as a second edition, which will be fantastic.
I noticed you'd instituted a freeze on the 31st of March, but obviously things were
still changing, and I've been, they've stabilized now, because we're only a few days away from
release, but things were still changing in Lucid.
How have you approached the synchronization of your first version with the actual release
candidate and the distribution version of Lucid that's coming up?
We've done quite well, actually.
We had to push back the writing freeze because of the whole button layout thing going on.
That was going to be my example.
Right, so I think, yeah, we had a few chapters and stuff which actually talked about the
buttons in quite a lot of detail.
Luckily, I have quite a good relationship with the design team and Evanko Magic, who's
the design team lead.
They were really great.
They were keeping us informed of what the changes and stuff are going to be.
We pushed it back about two weeks and sort of just managed to work it out, and then the
order of the buttons changed like a few days ago, and we just had to change a couple of
things there.
The screen shots had it already been taken.
We figured out a nice little hack to basically copy and paste the new window order over
the top of the old window order on all the screenshots, and it looks okay.
I've been talking to Evanko and Mark and stuff about this, and I think it's one of the
things I'd like to see for the next release of Ubuntu is that a lot of the user interface
freeze and that gets stuck to by the design team and things like that.
I think they're keen to open up a lot of their design and make it more transparent and
have more communication with the community.
That's definitely a good thing because it was, I mean, we have to get two and a half thousand
screenshots, and we were already pushing ourselves to give it four weeks and then we had to
push it back.
We only have a couple of weeks to get that, and it's safe to say that we're not going
to get all of the screenshots in time, but two and a half thousand screenshots, there's
not actually two and a half thousand screenshots in the actual manual, but what we're doing is
localizing the screenshots.
For example, for Spanish manual, we'll have Spanish screenshots, and the Chinese manual
will have Chinese screenshots.
The manual itself has like 50 screenshots, and then we're translating into 50 languages
so it's two and a half thousand.
And 50 languages is one heck of an ambitious target to go for, I think it's the repeated
calls for translators for various languages.
Yes, we're working on support for latex for the 50 languages, and there is absolutely
no way that we'll be able to get 50 languages out in the next couple of weeks.
So for Lucid, we're looking at the American English version, the UK English version, Australian
English, Spanish, and I think Galikin and German or something are also doing quite well.
And then basically what we'll do is the translations are finished, and the screenshots for them
are finished, we'll just release the translated manuals as they finish for the next year or
however long it takes.
Yeah, good to keep an eye on our website, just to check out when the language is in
that finish, we'll be putting up some sort of easy way to see how far through they are
sort of thing, so you know when it's available in your language.
So one of my questions moving on then was about the current state of the project, and
I thought actually one of your blog posts where you were trying to clear up some misunderstandings,
actually gives us a fairly good position of the project if you want to just sort of
outline where the project stands in the overall scheme of things.
At the moment, we're pretty busy just trying to get screenshots and translations.
At the start of a project where a lot of people seem to jump to conclusions and think
that it was sponsored by Canonical, the word official was bounded around quite a lot
on blog posts and in mating lists and things, and to be honest I have absolutely no idea
where that came from because when we first wrote up the outline for what the project was
about on our wiki, we didn't mention the word official at all, I've got no idea where
that came from, so that's something that sort of plagued us, a lot of people have thought
that we were official and all this sort of stuff and they're like, oh, this is cool,
and then the documentation team were like, what, we didn't hear about this, and so that's
also the stuff that we want to talk about at the developer summit and with, I've created
a decision for that collaboration and all this sort of stuff, so I think you were victims
of your own success because both the wiki and the launch pad pages looked so professional
that everybody jumps to the conclusion that they were of such a high standard, it must
be part of the core core development team.
That's, yeah, I agree with you there because we're definitely aiming for an incredibly
high standard.
I'm going back to your blog post, so the Ubuntu manual project is not sponsored or
funded by a canonical in any way, currently, although given what you've said, I think
you've generated sufficient interest that some more formal links might start to emerge,
if you had any more conversations with the canonical folks with that, yeah.
I think everybody's just sort of waiting to see what will happen on April 29th of our
stuff.
Our original goal was to include it on the CD, but at the moment, that's not feasible at
all because it's a LGS release, our PDF's like six megs or something, it's quite large,
but what I'd like to do is have it actually beside the download link for Ubuntu on the
Ubuntu.com website, and just have a little thing there saying, you know, would you like
the manual and you can click on it and it takes you to our website or, or download it.
And I also would like manual.obuntu.com, like a subdomain that hosts our website as well.
Stuff like that, just little things, and then at UDS we'll be talking about maybe perhaps
making like a cut down shorter versions, only a few pages long, that's just like the
quick start guide that we might include on the CD for Maverick, so that'll be something
we'll be talking about to develop a summit too.
That would be a great help to a lot of beginners, I'm sure.
Nobody's getting paid for writing a manual, you're all volunteers and there are no paid
professional technical authors on the team at all.
That's correct, yep, we're all volunteers, no one's getting paid.
The authors, we've got about six authors who have written the nine chapters.
Some of them have all of a fearing levels of writing experience and yeah, that's one
of the problems that we've had actually, that we sort of for sore, but we didn't think
it was going to be that bad as just we've had to do a hell of all editing to bring the
consistency in line, so it feels like it's actually written by one person as opposed
to a whole bunch of people.
And we've been sort of successful with that.
I hope that it'll be good when it comes out at 29th, but even then any errors in that
we'll be touching up for the next one and June or July.
The one thing I haven't tripped over in big flashing letters is something that says manual
style guide, which is something I was expecting to see highlighted in fairly big bold colours
somewhere.
Yeah, so that's also one of the first things we're going to do as soon as this release
is finished is actually create a proper style guide and have it a very, very visible all
over the place.
There is one at the moment that Kevin's whipped up, it's a few pages long, it's a PDF
and it has like a list of commands and stuff that we use, but yeah, as I said, we sort
of, we sort of like in a week, so much will change, it's unbelievable.
And so to create a document when we're still experimenting with different names for commands
and stuff, like a style guide is quite hard.
So I think it's probably to save yourself some editing coming from somebody who's come
out of industrial brochure publishing for the travel industry in the past, just to save
yourself the sheer amount of editing, having a two or three page style guide in terms of
content.
It's probably going to save you an awful lot of work as in what word forms we do and don't
use for this sort of thing versus passive voice and general style, because although we've
got an awful lot of very keen, willing technical people within the community, I'm not always
convinced that some of their linguistic skills are clear or concise as they should be
perhaps.
Yeah, and I won't ask you to comment on the quality of the submissions from that point
of view, because I can guess what you've had to deal with.
Yeah, it's been a bit of a mission finding people who are capable of writing something
to a high quality, but yeah, we've got there and I think, yeah, I'm happy with what we've
done so far.
It's in the amount of time we've had.
I think it's pretty awesome, and I think a lot of the people in the community and canonical
think that too.
It will be interesting to see what the reactions are like on the 29th.
We're aiming for 10,000 downloads on the first day of release, that's sort of our goal.
Yeah, I'm hoping that you will be pleasantly surprised and that your server admin is prepared
to beef up the servers, because of all the things that I've been looking at in the last
few months, I think this is the project that's captured my imagination because it's been
the one thing, whenever you look around any of the Linux distro forums, it's always the
beginners who are struggling to do Wi-Fi set up and set up their desktop and how do I
go and do updates and install new applications.
Anything that's as concise as this, consistent format with the graphics and the pictures
to go with it has got to be a great step forward for that.
If we're going to drive Linux into the mainstream, then we definitely need something like this
and the fact that you've set up such a thorough and industrial strength project to deliver
that, I think, is to everybody's credit, so I just want to say, well done to the entire
team for getting this far and long may you continue.
Yeah, well, thank you.
Yeah, thanks.
Okay, so I'm looking at the project Wiki, which is on Wiki.abunto.com slash Ubuntu-manual,
and that's got the download button on it to get the draft copy of the current manual.
We're moving most of the stuff from the Wiki across to Ubuntu-manual.org, which is
just our main website, and the main reason for that is so that we can have translation
support on the website, which we're building into at the moment, so the website will be
also available in a whole heap of languages to all the stuff on the website as well as
the Wiki.
Yeah, fantastic.
If there's an area where I'm launchpad, which is also launchpad.net slash Ubuntu-manual,
and then there is your blog, which I started reading, which is humpfreebc.wordpress.com.
We'll be keeping up with you on that as well.
I've been meaning to blog more, but I'll be quite busy recently, but producing an entire
manual does tend to slow you down on some of the other things, like eating, sleeping in
real life, I would expect.
Yes, it's been a hectic four months, it's quite, yeah, I never ended up thinking that
when I started it, because I don't know if anybody knows, but I actually just originally
started it as a closed source thing, and I was just writing it at an open office last
year.
It was going to be maybe 30 pages long, and I was just going to put my name on the cover,
and then I started talking to some people about it, and they were like, well, why don't
you make it open source and have a whole bunch of people write it, and I was like, that
sounds cool.
Put it on.
From the average snowballed, you've created a monster.
It's great though, I mean, it's fantastic.
We've got an awesome community going on, and everybody's like thoroughly enjoys it.
I have one person in our team who said the week leading up to Beto was one of her most
memorable weeks in this life, because it was just so hectic and so busy, and everybody
was just running around trying to edit the hell out of a thing, and like triage bugs
and stuff.
It's, yeah, it's a great atmosphere, and I definitely recommend people to come and check
us out and say hi and I see, and I'm sure we can find something for anybody to do.
Thank you very much Benjamin, that's been great, and we wish you all best with it, and
look forward to all the future versions.
Yeah, well thank you, thanks for the interview.
SIXUALA.
Thank you.
And if you're interested, Ubuntu Manual project is currently looking for a successor to
Benjamin as editor.
This is the full circle podcast on Hacker Public Radio.
We'll be back soon.
I'm Robin Katlin, goodbye for now.
