Just wanted to thank Rookie One for his help and collaboration with Amigo.Rookie One is an active contributor to the Open Source movement in many ways, including helping to make linux more accessible to everyone. As a postscript to a recent e-mail to me, he attached this note:
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P.S. BTW I've volunteered to localize (translate to Polish) the
Endeavour Mark II file manager and mantain the Slackware package for
it - it's a great piece of software, it's worth including in Amigo -
check out http://wolfpack.twu.net/Endeavour2/ - the official website,
and http://rookieone.freeserverhost.net/...eavour_mark_2/
for my Slack package (only i686 English version available at the
moment - i486 and other languages will be compiled & uploaded soon.
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Good Work!
If only I could get a dozen like you on the team! I hope that we might one day 'bundle' some translations to submit to other projects, especially for software that Amigo wil be relying on heavily.

Gilbert,

I don't know what I'm doing wrong, but I only get this
-rw-r--r-- 1 mingdao users 411 2004-12-20 00:26 endeavour2-2.4.6-i686-1lgod.tgz
when downloading endeavour from the link in your post.
On the page it says 4.0M but I'm just getting 411K. Can
you check this out?

Thanks!

Hey, Gilbert, I'm feeling kind of embarassed... I'm just contributing to a project, that's all...

@Chinaman: it seems that there's something wrong with my website host... I've already submitted a problem ticket to the webhosting company, hopefully they'll sort it out... Or maybe you know of a better free host? I don't feel like paying for my website...

Hey Rookie One,

Don't feel bad about the problem. I'm glad to know that it's something with
the host and not me.

FWIW I can't use hardly any Slack packs from Linuxpackages. They almost
always don't work with my system. For instance, I have a normal full install
of Slack-10.0 on this machine, and the K3b from Linuxpackage doesn't work.
What Linuxpackages.net did for me is cause me to learn how to compile
from source.

As for free hosting, I'm not the one to ask. My motto is "You get what you
pay for." Perhaps someone else can give you better advice.

Sorry, Rookie One if I put you up that way, but I think not too many people actually contribute in such ways. What I mean is, there are MANY fine coders out there who do the hardest part of our work, technically. But it really takes a special effort to work on ANY form of documentation -even more so localizations.

The chaotic, scattered state of documentation of linux-based OS's is one of the biggest hurdles to the ubiquity of Linux.

The misunderstood concept of Open Source and Free Software and its' messy implementation into viable financial models is another.

The use and development of Open Source software is growing exponentially anyway, especially in places like China, India, Russia and Eastern Europe. That's what makes localization so important.

As an aside -I see China and India soon leading and dominating the proliferation and development of OpenSouce and of new hardware protocols that may 'overtake' the direction the 'west' is going. Some months ago China bought their first microprocessor factory, and now they've bought IBM PC division also. We're about to find out how it feels to not understand the 'directions', when we use their software -unless they do better than we have with the docs!

Chinaman, I've had good luck with many packages from linuxpackages.net, but I always unpack them first in a temporary folder and inspect them. The common mistake is that people don't make a valid slack-desc file with matching package name. This causes the package to be unremovable with pkgtool/removepkg. Could be what happened with you, that something you thought was gone is still there...

Forgot to mention above, that the lack of uniformity in filesystem layout and software pkg format between distros, is one of the other 'enemies' of Linux.

Well, I don't know how to setup a slack-desc file, and when
a website (Linuxpackages) reports something to work with
Slackware-10.0, one would expect the standard to be with
a basic install and kernel. Rarely has this happened with one
from Linuxpackages. And they don't list dependencies and
such, either.

However, when I compile from source, there's nothing hidden
or undisclosed, and they always work.

IMO when one compiles a package for a distro it should work,
without having to reconfigure. Just my 2 cents....

I can't see linuxpackages.net (connection can't be established) and I have to visit the google cache of the mirrors page, then select a Romanian mirror and it's annoying. However some of the packages work and some don't.
The progress of China is really amazing! No comments are needed. And you are right - the Linux users in eastern Europe are more and more (I live in Bulgaria).

I've always want to contribute to the Open source community, but didn't feel experienced enough. I don't know who to ask, nor what's most needed and this rpevents me from any real work.

Actually, lack of experience can be an asset! Or at least being able to put yourself in that place. What I mean is that documentation for 'newbies' is sometimes best written by those who don't have years of experience. And localizations are a labor of love and pride for one's culture and language.
Do you have a favorite program that is not available in your native language? Contact the project and offer to translate it for them and see how pleased they are!

Would readily have to agree with gnashley on this.
Have checked out FreeBSD's documentation at http://www.freebsd.org/ and IMHO this provides such a centralized information model as compared with so many linux distros! FreeBSD is now up to Production Release 5.3.

From this FreeBSD site:
I have reviewed some of the above 'For Newbies', 'FAQ', and 'Handbook' sections, and already have a clear idea on some FreeBSD concepts as well as how to proceed with installation and usage.
Will any Linux distros ever do this in such a centralized way (do not mean tldp!) ??

Also, editing some of the Slackware/Amigo startup scripts created by Linux script expert MvS and Slackware's PV can be very unclear, more so for a newbie. Have had to disable so many devices and services that I never use on my own non-RAID'ed lower-end systems (e.g., hotplug, usb, apache, samba, ...etcetera)

Just some of my own thoughts.

-nycace36

I've set up my Slackware packages at http://www.dhost.info/rookieone/slackware-packages - now, they do work. Due to lack of time and upload bandwith I managed to upload English i686 Endeavour version and gFTP only, but I'll put something more up as soon as possible.