Here are a few resources for those among you thinking of writing proper documentation for your new project, or to contribute writings or translations to your favorite Community.

Man pages are written in Troff, the original UNIX typesetting system. Nowadays, few people (most notably man page writers and IETF RFC authors) regularly use this markup, but it is rather simple and elegant once you get to know it. For writing man pages, the learning curve is very good, as you only need to know a few macros and, just as if you were working on html and pilfering the sources of an existing page doing just what you need, you have a wealth of examples to teach you right there on your trusty *NIX box. As the Wikipedia points out:

Troff features commands to designate fonts, spacing, paragraphs, margins,
footnotes and more. Unlike many other text formatters, troff can position
characters...

openSUSE’s superior security has been recognized by a paper in ;login, the USENIX association’s magazine. According to the article, openSUSE is the only community Linux distro that’s on par with enterprise Linux distributions in protecting against recently discovered package management vulnerabilities.

What’s more, the openSUSE and SUSE Linux Enterprise distros not only secure packages and package metadata with cryptographic signatures, but have addressed the more exotic attacks described by the paper as well, with the slow-data fix currently in Factory completing the picture. The upshot of this is that users can deploy updates safely whether they’re obtaining updates from a centralized network or through a decentralized system of community maintained mirrors.

Cross-posted to the SUSE Blog