At the Ubuntu Manual Project we strive to produce quality material for our readers. This means that we have a very strict editing policy and pay attention to detail down to every single little comma.

If you’re a grammar freak and like to have everything perfect, then we need your help with:

• Proof-reading spelling and grammar
• Checking consistency of formatting
• Checking consistency of language and style
• Writing glossary entries
• Adding entries to the index

Getting started as an Author or Editor

To work on the project, you'll need to know how to do a few things:

• Create a Launchpad account and create an SSH key
• Join our team
• Download the bzr branch
• Install TeX Live 2009
• Start working on the tex files
• Compile the manual to test your work
• Commit and push to Launchpad

We'll walk you through each step here.

Creating a Launchpad Account

1. Go to https://launchpad.net and click "Register" in the top-right corner of the page
2. Fill in your details

   Now you need to create an SSH key. Instructions taken from here.

   1. Install OpenSSH. On Ubuntu, you can install OpenSSH by opening your terminal and typing:

   $ sudo apt-get install openssh-client

   2. Once OpenSSH is installed, stay in the terminal and type:

      $ ssh-keygen -t rsa

   3. When prompted, press Enter to accept the default file name for your key.
   4. Next, enter then confirm a password to protect your SSH key. Your key pair is stored in ~/.ssh/ as id_rsa.pub (public key) and id_rsa (private key)

Now you need to upload the public portion of your SSH key to Launchpad:
Open your public key in a text editor and copy its contents to your clipboard. The public key file has the extension .pub. For example: id_rsa.pub

3. Visit your SSH keys page.
4. Paste your public key into the text box and then click the Import public key button to continue.

Joining our team

1. Go here.
2. Click on "Join this team."
3. You should subscribe to the mailing list as well.

Downloading the bzr branch

You will need to install bzr. Run these commands in a terminal to install bzr and configure it.

1. Install bzr:

$ sudo apt-get install bzr

2. Configure bzr with your name and email:

   $ bzr whoami "Your name <email@domain.com>"

   To check that bzr knows who you are, run:

   $ bzr whoami

   If it has worked, it should return your name and email address. Now we need to download the Ubuntu Manual branch.
1. Create a new directory in your home folder called "Projects".
2. Change into that directory in a terminal window:

   $ cd ~/Projects

3. Once you are in your Projects directory, run this command to download our branch:

   $ bzr branch lp:ubuntu-manual

4. Bzr will now download the project files. This may take a few minutes depending on your connection speed.

Installing TeX Live 2009

The Ubuntu Manual requires TeX Live 2009. The version of TeX Live in the Ubuntu 9.10 repositories is 2007. In Lucid, there are packages for TeX Live 2009, but they are not new enough. You must use the upstream version of TeX Live 2009 to compile the manual successfully.

Installing TeX Live 2009

1. First, remove any Ubuntu TeX Live packages, if you have them installed.

$ sudo apt-get remove texlive-*

2. Download the TeX Live 2009 install script
   Download now
3. Unpack the tarball:

$ tar xvf install-tl-unx.tar.gz

4. Change to the newly-unpacked directory:

$ cd install-tl-*

5. Run the script:

$ sudo ./install-tl

6. Select where you'd like to install everything, and any other options you prefer. If you choose not to install everything, the minimum that you'll need is the following collections:
1. Essential programs and files (a)
2. LaTeX recommended packages (s)
3. XeTeX packages (C)
4. We highly recommend enabling the "create symlinks to standard directories" option.

Under the language collections, you can skip all the documentation, but be sure to install all the languages you wish to translate into. (If the language you wish to translate into isn't listed in the menu, don't worry, there are just no specific packages required for that language.)

Once those are installed, we can install the remainder of the packages with the install-pkgs.sh script. (Note that this hasn't been tested yet and it's pure guesswork on Kevin's part! Let us know if it does or doesn't work for you.)

7. Run the install-pkgs.sh script that's in the ubuntu-manual/pkgs/ directory to make sure you have all the required packages.
8. If everything checks out okay, you should be able to run: make ubuntu-manual-LANG.pdf where LANG is the language code (see the po/ directory for a list of supported languages).

Checking Prerequisites

To make sure you have all the prerequisites installed, run the install-pkgs.sh script (located in the ubuntu-manual/pkgs/ directory).

The script will check for the required Ubuntu packages, TeX packages, and fonts.

We are interested in people to help with:

• Title page design
• Logo design
• Creating icons
• Website design and implementation
• Miscellaneous artwork for wiki and social media sites
• User Interface and usability design for applications like Quickshot
• Style definitions

If you want to help out, the best thing to do is to email our mailing list or join our IRC channel and tell us what your skills are and what you would like to do.

Mailing List: ubuntu-manual@lists.launchpad.net

To have a look at the artwork specification, mission statement, target audience and design guidelines, have a look at the Artwork page.

Over here in the manual project we don’t mess around when it comes to producing awesome documentation. It’s so awesome in fact, that it’s translated in dozens of languages - over 50 in fact. We always need more translators to help make our publication available to as many people in the world as we can!

The only pre-requisite is that you can understand English to translate into your own language, and that you have a Launchpad account!

Getting started as an Ubuntu Manual translator.

First off, you'll need a Launchpad account with your languages set up.

Go to http://launchpad.net, and click "Register" in the top right corner. Follow the steps to create an account. Once you've created an account, go to your page by clicking your name in the top right corner. Click the yellow "Edit" icon next to the "Languages" header, and add all the languages you intend to translate into.

Once you've done that, you're all set up and ready to go. Go to http://translations.launchpad.net/ubuntu-manual you should see the languages you've selected listed. Click on the one you want to translate into, and translate the text you see into the boxes.

It's that easy!

We’re lucky to be quite a large project, so we have to develop our own tools and applications to help us get things done. At the moment, our main focus is Quickshot, a python application that helps us take a lot of localized screenshots.

We need python developers to help with:

• UI design
• Interfacing with Bazaar and Launchpad

Becoming a Programmer

At the moment, we need programmers experienced in:

• Python - for Quickshot
• Tex/LaTeX - for "Getting Started with Ubuntu 11.04"

If you want to help with TeX, contact Kevin Godby: kevin AT ubuntu-manual DOT org

To help with Quickshot in python, you'll have to create a Launchpad account, join the Quickshot team and download the source files in our branch. We'll walk you through the process here.

Creating a Launchpad Account

1. Go to https://launchpad.net and click "Register" in the top-right corner of the page
2. Fill in your details

   Now you need to create an SSH key. Instructions taken from here.

   1. Install OpenSSH. On Ubuntu, you can install OpenSSH by opening your terminal and typing:

   $ sudo apt-get install openssh-client

   2. Once OpenSSH is installed, stay in the terminal and type:

      $ ssh-keygen -t rsa

   3. When prompted, press Enter to accept the default file name for your key.
   4. Next, enter then confirm a password to protect your SSH key. Your key pair is stored in ~/.ssh/ as id_rsa.pub (public key) and id_rsa (private key)

Now you need to upload the public portion of your SSH key to Launchpad:
Open your public key in a text editor and copy its contents to your clipboard. The public key file has the extension .pub. For example: id_rsa.pub

3. Visit your SSH keys page.
4. Paste your public key into the text box and then click the Import public key button to continue.

Joining our team

1. Go here.
2. Click on "Join this team."
Note: Quickshot developers is a restricted team which means you'll need to be approved by an administrator. Join us in #ubuntu-manual on irc.freenode.net and introduce yourself and say you want to be accepted into the Quickshot developer team.
3. You should subscribe to the mailing list as well.

Downloading the bzr branch

You will need to install bzr. Run these commands in a terminal to install bzr and configure it.

1. Install bzr:

$ sudo apt-get install bzr

2. Configure bzr with your name and email:

   $ bzr whoami "Your name <email@domain.com>"

   To check that bzr knows who you are, run:

   $ bzr whoami

   If it has worked, it should return your name and email address. Now we need to download the Quickshot branch.
1. Create a new directory in your home folder called "Projects".
2. Change into that directory in a terminal window:

   $ cd ~/Projects

3. Once you are in your Projects directory, run this command to download our branch:

   $ bzr branch lp:quickshot

4. Bzr will now download the project files. This may take a few minutes depending on your connection speed.