FLOSS Manuals Expands Its Open Source Documentation Effort

by Sam Dean - May. 13, 2010Comments (4)

It's been a while since we here at OStatic checked in on FLOSS Manuals, an ambitious effort to produce free, online documentation for open source software that we initially covered in this post. FLOSS Manuals is an excellent learning and reference resource for titles such as OpenOffice, Firefox, Audacity, Blender, Inkscape and more. Here are some of the details on what's new there.

Since our last look at the free manuals that FLOSS Manuals includes, the site has expanded its coverage of open source projects markedly. In addition to the manuals that the site has always housed, there are now links to fee-based online books on various topics, such as this one on how people living under restrictive government regimes can bypass Internet censorship (housed on Lulu.com). There is no shortage of free documentation on the site, though.

Here is a free guide to Handbrake, which is one of the best open source applications for working with video and DVDs. And here is a free guide to Campcaster, which is open source radio management software that is especially good for producing live broadcasts. FLOSS Manuals also has an excellent, free guide to VLC Media Player, one of the very best open source media players.

The manuals found at FLOSS Manuals remain high in quality, and are reasonably exhaustive. For example, in cases where open source applications is available for Mac OSX, Windows and Linux, FLOSS Manuals' provides installation instructions for all three platforms. Given that one of the persistent criticisms of open source software is lack of documentation, FLOSS Manuals is worth checking out.

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by El Spamolito on May. 13, 2010

Small correction: The fee-based books are hard-copy, not online. All FLOSS Manuals books are available gratis electronically; some of them are also available in hard-copy from lulu.com, at cost plus a little markup to support the project. FLOSS Manuals books are all free as in freedom, but paper and ink cost money (as do servers, electricity, and net access).

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by John Curwood on May. 14, 2010

Hi Lester,

You can find the English Language Version at http://en.flossmanuals.net/ and from there you can connect to other language sites as well as a translation site for translating existing Manuals into other languages.

Cheers, John

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by an anonymous user on Oct. 19, 2010

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0 Votes