Re: New flyers - need help

[Matthew Mondor <mm_lists%pulsar-zone.net@localhost>]

On Thu, 22 Dec 2011 21:41:10 +0100
Julian Fagir <gnrp%komkon2.de@localhost> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> some time ago, we made German flyers because the current ones were fairly
> outdated (as well as the International ones).
> They are intended for the 'switcher' from Linux to NetBSD.
> 
> Anyway, here's a translation. As you can see, I'm no native speaker nor much
> into the system, so I'd like to see these flyers corrected.
> 
> Regards, Julian
> 
> PS: No PDFs attached, they would be too large (about 100KB each). You need
> the NetBSD logo from the website for compiling, then called "NetBSD.png".
> You can find the pdf versions on
> http://komkon2.de/nbflyer/en-wickelfalz.pdf
> http://komkon2.de/nbflyer/en-wechsel.pdf
> http://komkon2.de/nbflyer/en-tipps.pdf

Note that I was already impressed with all the content those flyers
had, so you can take the following with a grain of salt and decide what
is really worth adding, if any.

Another impression of mine was that this seems very verbose already if
it's supposed to be promotional material, and that perhaps this may
best belong in a "NetBSD for Linux users" section in the NetBSD Guide...


en-tipps.pdf:

- The title is all in lowercase, I would suggest "Tips and tricks"
- There still is a title Nutzliche, is that intentional?  I
  unfortunately have no idea what it means :)
- There is mention about devices (mentioning they're named after their
  producer, i.e. wm0 vs eth0).  I would suggest to refer briefly to
  tools to discover their names there: dmesg, sysctl, pcictl, drvctl,
  ifconfig
- I also would suggest adding a note for atactl i.e. for smart stats etc
- Suggest to look at the very important afterboot(8) and security(8)
  (not sure where to put it, or if another section should be added)
- Uses of "Linux'" should be "Linux's"

en-wechsel.pdf:

- The english could be better in some cases but it wasn't particularily
  bad, and it was comprehensive.
- Monitoring might be missing: top, ipfstat
- The Partitioning section might be missing a reference to fdisk(8)
  too, but also a reference to wedge dk(4) when it mentions gpt(4)
- The part explaining about special labels c and d:
  - I'm not sure about c, but I think that d is architecture-specific
    (on x86 it is as you described)
  - The sentence should probably be reformulated:
    "Partitions c perhaps d" is unclear, perhaps what was meant was
    "Partitions c and d"?
  - "addressed the whole disk" is past tense, "addresses the whole
    disk" is probably what was intended
- Raw Devices section:
  - The sentence explaining the difference between raw and block
    devices is ambiguous IMO, and there is an opening parenthesis which
    never closes
  - It mentions that the raw device should be used with dd, but fails
    to mention that it's also recommended for newfs
- Periodic mails:
  - I spotted a use of contrab vs crontab :) I also suggest appending
    (5)
  - "They write" should most probably be "the system sends"
- "start scripts, init" might be best as "Init and boot scripts"
  perhaps?  There also is a typo: "wiht" -> "with"
- Networking
  - "The networking of NetBSD is configured in the rc.conf a well"
    perhaps:
    "On NetBSD, networking is also configured via rc.conf"
  - The sentence:
    "To configure the network manually"...:
    "The network can also be configured manually using ifconfig(8),
    which is very similar to how it's done on Linux.  ifconfig(8) also
    integrates some of Linux's iwconfig(8).
- pkgsrc:
  - I suggest naming the section "Packages" perhaps
  - self-complaining should probably be self-explanatory? :)
  - There is an ad-hoc find(1) example but no mention of pkgfind
  - There probably should be short mention of pkg_info(1)/pkg_delete(1)
  - Since it mentions cleaning up sources after a build, it might be
    worth to specify that if mk.conf specifies a WRKOBJDIR (i.e.
    WRKOBJDIR=/tmp/pkgsrc-obj) then all built object files will be
    in /tmp/pkgsrc-obj, so one can simply rm -rf /tmp/pkgsrc-obj after
    building a bunch of packages...  Maybe this is unnecessary, but I
    personally do that which saves a lot of time and avoids polluting
    my pkgsrc work repository.
  - Should there be mention of pkg_comp(1) for building packages in
    chroots?
- Binary packages:
  - Oh, I now see pkg_info(1) referenced...
- mk.conf:
  - Although there is (5) in the reference, it later says how to know
    what to put in mk.conf, but perhaps that it should also specify to
    check the manual page.
  - No mention that it also serves to build the distribution, not only
    for pkgsrc.  Not sure if this is relevant to add though.  Just that
    in mk.conf a conditional is necessary to distinguish pkgsrc and
    system build options, i.e.: .ifdef BSD_PKG_MK
- Other tools
  - Oh I now see a section where adding pkg_comp(1) is probably the
    right place.
- as you can note, above I am unsure where pkg_info(1)/pkg_delete(1)
  really belong. This is because I don't view pkgsrc as an alterative to
  pkg_add(1), but as a tool to build binary repositories.  I personally
  have a build host using pkgsrc, that is used to create a binary
  repository for other systems which use pkg_add(1).  In the text there
  is mention that pkg_add(1) will install binary repositories using
  official options.  Those are the options chosen by the sysadmin who
  built the repository (in my case, me).

en-wickelfalz.pdf:

It could be because the text is more in prose, but I noticed when
reading it that many sentences could be reformulated to read better in
english :(

If you want, when I have more time I could post a modified txt file for
it, and let others here also review if they prefer that edition?


Of course, the names of the english translated files could be better,
but that probably doesn't matter for pre-printed flyers :)

If there is interest, I could perhaps eventually also help with a
french translation (I'll then use the english text to start from, as I
don't know german).
-- 
Matt