Vote:Best Newbie Helper

We were all a newbie once, and each day there are more of them then there were the day before. These are the guys that are doing the most to turn the newbies into competent Linux users. They answer questions on IRC. They write documentation. And they are as important for the future of Linux as the hackers who write the code. The nominees in this category are Sensei, Matt Welsh, Havoc Pennington, and Tom Christiansen. You know what to do.

LDP and HOWTOs

[nazerim]

I think the single most important resource of Linux must be the Linux Documentation Project and the myriad of HOWTO's available. (Personally , the PPP-HOWTO needs severe updating , and needs to be supplemented with a Modem-HOWTO, but this is a side issue ...)

I use the LDP almost daily, in helping others use Linux. I often refer others to it - through experience, if it takes me 6 hours to figure something out, it would have taken 30 minutes if I'd just been bothered to read the HOWTO.

Thank you Matt, you're a star.

Havoc pennington

[alehmann]

I nominated Havoc. He is always around on IRC to answer my dumb questions. If it weren't for Havoc, I'm sure much of GNOME would not exist or be in a much worse state due to his value to newbie GTK/Gnome hackers.

I'm Sensei, Hear me roar

[Sensei^]

Hi, I'm Sensei. I started and run the website Linuxnewbie.org.

We help newbies and help everyone use and get better with Linux. We create a positive cycle of learning where the community helps itself.

Call it a LUG, a think tank, a watering hole, whatever.

I just wanted to give some background on who the fsck Sensei is. :)

What did I do to deserve this?

[Matt Welsh]

What did I do for Linux newbies? Seems like more than I can remember...

Well, I:

• Started the Linux Documentation Project
• Started the HOWTO project
• Wrote the first free book about Linux: "Linux Installation and Getting Started"
• Wrote the first published general-purpose book about Linux: "Running Linux" (O'Reilly and Associates)
• Developed the first Linux website - the Linux Documentation Site at sunsite.unc.edu
• Maintained the Linux documentation FTP archives at sunsite
• Wrote a number of HOWTOs
• Maintained several sections of the original Linux FAQ
• Wrote numerous magazine articles, for Linux Journal, Linux Magazine, Dr. Dobb's, etc.
• Moderated both comp.os.linux.announce and comp.os.linux.answers (the FAQ/HOWTO newsgroup)
• Developed the Linuxdoc-SGML tools suite (now called SGML-Tools) for writing free documentation
• Answered approximately 50-75 e-mails a day from Linux users for a period of almost 3 years
• Gave Linux tutorials and talks at several conferences and trade shows -- before there was such thing as a Linux conference
• Organized several Linux events, including last summer's O'Reilly Linux Conference
• Was a founding member of the Debian project and Linux International

Okay, so a lot of my contributions might be "ancient history", but I would only hope that they were instrumental in making Linux as popular as it is today. Helping newbies was my top priority for longer than I can remember. Maybe that deserves a vote.

Cheers,
Matt Welsh

Info on the nominees

[jfunk]

• Sensei - Started LinuxNewbie.org [linuxnewbie.org]
  
• Matt Welsh - Wrote a couple of books. his homepage is here [berkeley.edu]
  
• Havoc Pennington - Works on GNOME for Red Hat. His page is here [pair.com]
  
• Tom Christiansen - Did a lot of Perl documentation. More info here [perl.com]
  

I'm voting Sensei myself. He seems to cover a lot more ground at LinuxNewbie, a site I first visited today. That site seems to better cover the lone newbie wanting information on anything rather than just one thing. Welsh comes a close second.

Re:Info on the nominees

[jfunk]

I didn't know who Sensei was either, so I did a search and found out. That's why I posted the comment. So others could quickly find out.

Not my first choice. I nominated the guys that started nowonder.com. Sensei was the closest thing, though.