NewBieCorner

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[edit] NewBie Corner

[edit] Getting Involved

Getting involved in any Open Source Project is extremely simple. What keeps most people away from it is the lack of direction. Folks do not know how they could contribute to a particular project. Besides, the definition of 'contribution' itself is misunderstood!

  • What does it mean to contribute?

Firstly,

Contribution != code

There are umpteen number of things you can do to proudly say you contribute towards open source movement. Its not just about code. Rusty Rusell, an established kernel hacker, conducted a brilliant session at the close of the ceremony at FOSS.in to emphasize just this.

Start using foss today : Make Linux your primary desktop. Thats the first step towards your contribution. Use it to anything and everything. Play with it. Try to do new stuff on it. Explore the system.

Evangelise foss : Influence people around you to switch to foss..Help them out in setting it up and fixing issues they might have.

Help in making any open source software better : A project is generally vast. To be able to contribute towards its development is no mean task. Even a single line of code change can involve significant effort and time. The simplest would be to read through the documentation. Play with the tool. Provide documentation if required, report bugs, help in resolving the bugs, feature enhancements and testing. Don't keep quiet when you come across an error in an application that you are using. Report it to the application specific community (i.e its mailing list). The developers too encourage this. Hopefully by the next release of the software, the fix would be in! This will improve the quality of the software and will be an encouragement for many more people to switch over to foss. It will also enhance your technical skills as well as help in making Linux better.

[edit] Group GuideLines

[edit] Documents/Writeups

[edit] Useful Documents (Name can be changed)

[edit] FAQs

Red Hat specific FAQ's:

[edit] HOWTOs

[edit] HOWTO Choose a Linux Distro

[edit] Migration

Migrating from closed source, proprietary softwares to Linux. Find your Linux equivalent for any kind of softwares, be it Word processors or Office tools.

[edit] Women Communities

There are several women communities like LinuxChix.in Most of them pertaining to a particular project. Here are links to a few of them. You could get involved with any or all of these. Would be a good starting point to learn more of these projects, to expand your network in the particular project you are interested in, enhance your technical skills, etc

[edit] Podcasts

[edit] Videocasts

[edit] Screencasts

Here is a compilation of a few videos of related to getting started with Linux, installation, desktop usage, etc, so that you can make it your primary OS ;-)

[edit] Fedora

[edit] Ubuntu

[edit] Chat

Converse with other LinuxChix via IRC. Here is nice how-to http://www.linuxchix.org/irc-chat.html

You will find most of your other communities hosted under freenode.net. Here is nice primer on how-to converse with your communities http://freenode.net/using_the_network.shtml

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