Episode: 690
Title: HPR0690: Resources for Autodidacts
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0690/hpr0690.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 00:58:18

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Welcome to another edition of Hacker Public Radio.
I'm your host, Kerbund II, and for this episode I would like to propose and kick off a new general topic,
to which I hope many others will contribute, including listeners who are waiting for an excuse to join the ranks of HPR podcasters.
We have at least two traditional HPR topics about which almost everyone can make a recording.
The first seems to be a way to introduce ourselves to the HPR community.
Some variation of how I started using Linux or my first computer,
that's how I got my feet wet last year with my I blame Tom Merritt episode.
The second traditional topic, one for which I have yet to make a contribution,
is a variation on the theme of what do I carry in my laptop bag,
or if you're one of those multi-pocketed cargo pants sorts, what is my daily carry.
But I'd like to propose another topic, to which all of us could contribute for the benefit of all the other listeners.
It's my sense that most of us in the HPR community are auto-dyed acts.
An auto-dyed act is a person who learns a subject without benefit of a teacher or formal education.
That is to say, most of us are self-taught about Linux or GNU Linux, pardon me Richard,
and we're self-taught about free Libre open source software and many aspects of hardware hacking and maintenance.
For the majority of us discovery and learning is part of the thrill of hacking.
And so is sharing what we've discovered and learned.
Yes, we may be auto-dyed acts, but most of us use secondary sources,
whether they are books, websites, online videos, podcasts, or the like.
My proposal is that we start a new tradition in which many of us share these resources with each other VHPR episodes.
Something you've found helpful and instructive may help me too.
Having put that proposal on the table, let me offer two resources that I have found helpful
and which you may not have encountered during your forays on the web.
The first resource I offer is a learning center from Hewlett Packard Corporation.
I can't remember how I first discovered it, but it was probably through HPR, HP's, email promotions.
The learning center offers a slew of free online courses.
Now, admittedly, most of them are windows and Adobe related.
There's a heavy emphasis on Photoshop and Microsoft Office 2007.
These may or may not be of interest to you, but there's something you can offer folks who come to you looking to learn windows related products.
Some courses are more generic and consumer-oriented focusing on things like various aspects of digital photography, setting up Wi-Fi, and keeping kids safe on the internet.
But if you dig deep enough, the Hewlett Packard Learning Center offers courses like Linux 101-201-301 and 401,
which deal with topics like administering Linux for users' introduction to Linux System Administration and Intermediate System Administration skills.
I am working my way through these now and picking up more knowledge as I go.
In fact, as a personal challenge, I wind up taking the end of class quiz before covering the material since these courses are broken up into four and five classes each.
And from the quiz results, I take the information necessary to pay special attention to the parts of the chapter that will backfill the holes and pits in my ignorance.
Now, these particular courses work, these particular courses walk the Auto-DiDec through the installation of Debian and the course materials assume that you can work hands-on with Debian.
I set up a virtual machine with virtual box, and option suggested in the Linux 101 courses I recall, and put that up every time I have 15 minutes or so to devote to the next class in the coursework.
A word of experience here, though, the latest downloadable version of Debian is six, and the course materials assume that you're using Debian five.
If I had it to do all over again, I would hunt down a copy of Debian five and install that in order to stay close to the instructions that say, pull down this menu and choose that option when it's dealing with the GUI interface.
Now, there are some other interesting courses that appeal to me. I'd like to explore them as well. They are courses like servers 101, disaster preparedness through virtualization, networking 101, intermediate website design, introduction to storage networks, and network attached storage.
Of course, I'll put the link to the Hewlett Packard Learning Center in the show notes.
The second resource I'm recommending today exemplifies the best of non-programming contributions to free software I've ever encountered.
There is a site called odfauthors.org, that's odf as an open document format. Don't worry, it'll be in the show notes.
Back before, LibriOffice forked off of openoffice.org, the site was called ooauthors.org. These folks have put together some amazingly thorough manuals for all the modules in openoffice.org suite, and they're clearly working on LibriOffice as well.
And when I say amazingly thorough, I mean they are well written, well designed, well illustrated books that are hundreds of pages each. As an example, the book for writer 3.2 is 528 pages, while the manual for impress is 275 pages.
The calc guide, that is the spreadsheet guide, is no lightweight either weighing in at 497 pages. Now you might ask, who needs a guide to work with writer? Well, I can tell you that I do.
Our ministry publishes books in an order to do camera ready layout of a book well, all sorts of word processing tools are needed.
Master documents, templates, custom styles, footnotes, end notes, different facing headers and footers, sections, cross referencing, indexing, tables, marginalia, right to left insertions, and sometimes we deal with Hebrew words and Bible teaching context.
Formatting coin a Greek characters with special diacritical marks, and of course tables of content. That's just a partial list, but you get the idea. I need a resource to help me with these very powerful but little known features. I have to say much to the credit of the authors I have yet to find a problem for which they haven't given me the solution. Amazingly thorough indeed.
This team is working hard to keep these manuals current with the latest versions of the two office suites, and there are localized versions available in English, German, Dutch, Greek, and at least two Asian languages, probably Korean and Chinese, but I'm only guessing since I can't read them.
The manuals are available as free PDF downloads, they're also available as free dot ODT downloads, that is open document text files, the free library international alternative to dot doc and dot dot x formats.
That means that a user can even open the document and see how the team used writer's styles and other features, which is kind of like having the layout source code as it were.
If printed books are your thing, you could of course download these files and print them out, but the authors make their work available through a print on demand publishing firm called lulu dot com.
I also recommend lulu dot com, but that's a separate podcast for another day. For instance, the 528 page open office dot org 3.2 writer manual is available through lulu dot com for $20 US.
If you've ever purchased any software instructional books, you'll recognize that price as a super bargain. Buying copies this way would be a great way to help support this very worthwhile project.
And speaking of supporting the project, the website is replete with all the information you'd ever need to help contribute to the writing of these manuals.
If you want to do something more for open source than just to offer an hpr episode, by the way, this doesn't get you off the hook from offering an hpr episode.
And you're a decent writer or you can translate the odf authors dot org site features an abundance of things you'd need, style guides, writing guides, contact information.
It's all there, including links to the site's wiki.
The team can also use volunteer indexers, editors and proofreaders.
Well, there you have it. I recommend the links courses on the hp learning center. They aren't turning me into a linux ninja necessarily, but I've learned new things and had other concepts clarified along the way.
And to use a British phrase, I'm over the moon about the tremendous resources offered for mastering the more obscure and arcane features of library office and open office dot org modules like writer, calc, impress, base, and the like.
I trust that some of you auto didax will find my suggestions helpful and that it will inspire others to share with the rest of us the learning resources they have discovered.
If you haven't yet made your contribution of a hacker public radio episode or if you haven't contributed an episode in a while, here's another subject on which you can hold forth and one less excuse for not sharing.
Thanks for listening to hacker public radio. Tell your friends about hacker public radio better still tell your friends to listen to an episode of HP are that you have contributed.
Oh, wait, you can't do that unless you send in or called in an episode. Can you? Well, get cracking. This is group into signing off.
Thank you for listening to hacker public radio. HP are sponsored by Carol dot net. So head on over to see a ro dot anything for all of us.