I’m proud to announce that we’ve released a brand new ‘Getting Started with Fedora’ handbook. The goal was to create something that a user would get as an incentive to look at Fedora and what would walk them from getting it (e.g. at our booth at a conference) to getting familiar with the system (what Fedora is about and what it has to offer, how to get it, how to install it, how to use it).

I had the idea of such a handbook in mind for two years, but I never found enough time to work on it. I started during the last Christmas, but then I decided to get the Czech online Fedora guide into shape first and yeah, it’s never ending task. But at Fedora 22 release party in Prague, I spoke with Lukáš Kotek who liked the idea and responded: “Hey, I’m a high school teacher, I’ll have a plenty of time after June 30th, so I can work on it”. And he did. The content was roughly done in July, then we tuned it (myself and Jaroslav Řezník provided feedback), it went through proof reading (Kveta Mrstikova and Jiri Kroupa), then Maria Leonova added a cover, and Petr Cech did typsetting in TeX.

It was meant to be a pilot project. It’d have been better to do it in English first, but all people I gathered for it were Czechs, so it was much quicker to do it in Czech and have something finished as soon as possible. Early feedback from users is crucial here. And the feedback has so far been very positive, the handbooks were very popular at LinuxDays in Prague last week. So we’d like to go ahead and translate it to English. We will need native speakers who will proof-read it, but right now we’re looking for people who would figure out some viable system for translations which would make it easy to translate the handbook, which would handle updates etc.

The handbook could be a very good replacement of DVDs. USB sticks are still >10x more expensive than DVDs, but we were able to have the handbook printed in good quality for $.50* which is pretty close to DVDs ($.35). It doesn’t include media with Fedora, but it provides much much more information about Fedora.

We have a git repo for the handbook and you can also check out a PDF version.

* The owner of the printery turned out to be a Linux enthusiast, so he gave us a really good price and gave us a lot of tips to tune it to get better print results.