[SunRescue] Hardware reference re-structuring ideas.

[Gregory Leblanc]

Chris Petersen wrote:

> > III. Architecture and Hardware Specifics
> >
> >        A. Sun1 Architecture Notes
> >
> >             i. Sun 1 Hardware Notes/Errata
> >
> >            ii. Other machines here
> >
> >        B. Other Sun Architecture Notes
> 
> I think you got my idea, but in case you did'nt, between Sun1 and Sun4m
> sections there would be a section for each of the architectures...

Yeah, section B. is intended as a placeholder, not a an actual section. 
I guess I didn't make that clear, but I was going to finish filling out
those sections as soon as I get done with some work that I get paid
for.  I used the same placeholder type concept throughout the outline.

> 
> As in my earlier post, I would also add a Motherboard or CPU section here to
> cover the non-VME or MultiBUS CPU boards, such as the motherboard out of any
> of the pizza box Suns.  Not sure how to entitle it, so that people don't get
> confused with the Mbus and VME sections, but I would add it before
> Keyboards & Mice and right after the busses.  Maybe entitle it "Non-bus
> based Mainboards" or something like that.  I'm sure somebody on the list can
> suggest a snappier heading.

This sounds reasonable to me.

> > Just to let you know, I wrote this in DocBook SGML, just to start
> > getting aquainted with it.  It's pretty darn easy to write, and output
> > to HTML is really easy.  Not sure how to do anything else yet, so I just
> > used netscape to save this as text.  If people could fill in with
> > answers to the specific questions I asked, that'd be great.
> >       Greg
> >
> 
> You've mentioned DocBook SGML a couple of times...Is this a commercial
> product, or something opensource?  Where can I find some more info?  I have
> a feeling I might be contributing quite a bit to your project, if you're of
> need for the help, and so I figure I should look into this package...I've
> done some SGML awhile back, but it's been awhile...

DocBook is just a Document Type Definition for SGML.  Basically it's a
set of rules for using markup, somewhat like HTML.  HTML can be written
as a DTD for SGML, so HTML is simply a subset of SGML.  DocBook is
probably the 800 pound gorilla of DTDs for technical writing.  A variant
of DocBook is used by GNOME and KDE for their documentation projects. 
Sun has also started shipping their man pages in SGML source, I think
using DocBook or their own variant, although I haven't checked.  SGML
isn't really any good on it's own, since nobody wants to read markup,
they want to read something rendered.  The SGMLTools package does this,
and it actually works on linux (nobody I know has been able to get it to
compile on Solaris, yet).  For information on DocBook, you can look at
http://www.docbook.org/.  There are links here to an online version of a
book on DocBook, which is pretty good to get you started.  The SGMLtools
package lives at http://www.sgmltools.org/, although the author of those
programs isn't maintaining them anymore. 
	Greg