As mentioned in previous posts, I've been helping the OpenIndiana project with updating their end user systems documentation. The existing documentation site uses a WIKI, but it's been neglected for several years and has become outdated. With the OpenIndiana distribution experiencing something of a renaissance over the past year, the poor state of the end user documentation has become all the more apparent.
To that end, I've assisted the project with a documentation revitalization initiative. We now have an MkDocs site served from Github pages (https://docs.openindiana.org) and all documentation now resides on GitHub (https://github.com/OpenIndiana/oi-docs). Using Travis-CI, the site gets automatically pushed whenever we make a commit. It's a splendid example of continuous integration.
Currently we're in the process of reviewing and migrating content from the old WIKI to the new platform, but that's going to take some time to complete. Hopefully within the next year we'll complete this effort.
To assist with this process I have been using a Lenovo W500 laptop running Linux Mint 17.2 KDE as my primary workstation. It works pretty well for writing documentation, but it's not really optimal for spending long hours running virtual machines and writing documentation. A newer and more powerful system with a mechanical keyboard is far more ideal.
To that end I picked up an ASROCK Deskmini which is running a new Intel i3-6100 dual core with hyperthreading. This system is significantly faster than my old laptop with it's rather dated core 2 duo. To that I have added a nice Samsung 24 inch wide screen LCD monitor and a Tesoro mechanical keyboard (with Cherry brown switches). I love the new system. It's fast, modern, and powerful. It's quite energy efficient as well.
While the old laptop was running Linux Mint 17.2, I've been wanting to move away from the Debian world and back into the Redhat based world. While I love Linux Mint and will sorely miss it, I'm doing this because where I work we're primarily a Redhat shop and I need to get up to speed supporting a Redhat based environment.
I would have installed Centos 7 on the new machine, but discovered the hardware is too new for Centos 7. It would not install. Fortunately the KDE spin of Fedora 25 installed without much fuss.
So, here we are on a nice shiny new system running Fedora 25 and now we need to install a few things to optimize it as a documentation generating platform.
First....I gotta have Chromium. Firefox just isn't going to cut it.
sudo dnf install chromium
Next on the list is Vim. While Kate is nice, I feel more at home in Vim.
sudo dnf install vim
To write docs, I'm going to need a few more things as well. We're going to need GIT, Ruby Gems, and MkDocs along with the bootswatch themes.
We'll start with Ruby Gems and GIT.
sudo dnf install rubygems git
Now for MkDocs and the bootswatch themes:
sudo pip install mkdocs mkdocs-bootswatch
And so I can validate the markdown used for MkDocs, I'll also install MarkDown Lint.
sudo gem install mdl
There you go. Everything which is required for writing docs for the OpenIndiana Project. If you care to join in on the fun, shoot us an email: Docs AT OpenIndiana.org
