On Tuesday 15 March 2005 10.35, Rapid Sun wrote: > Dear Sir or Madam, > Last month, i have attended Debian Mini Conference in Beijing. The > project manager, Mr. Martin, mentioned about helping Debian. > Cambodia is new to Open Source. I am very interesting in this and some > of my students want to be debian developer. > Can you tell me how can we start on this? Hi, The best place is to start by reading the Debian web site, especially starting at <http://www.debian.org/devel/join/> and <http://www.debian.org/devel/>. The short summary: don't start by applying to become an official, registered Debian Developer. Instead, get familiar with Debian, with its strengths and its weaknesses (both from a technical and structural/organisational view point.) Find where Debian is lacking and where you think you can work on improving Debian. Find people who are currently working in these areas (this is a very important step!), and talk to those people (often through a mailing list - if you're not sure, people on IRC or on the general debian-devel mailing list will certainly point you in the right direction.) Report bugs in the Debian bug tracking database (<http://bugs.debian.org>), but check first if the same bug was not reported before. It is very important to me that you don't get the impression that you wanting to help is not appreciated - quite on the contrary, Debian can use more people. But it *does* take quite a bit experience for many tasks, and getting experience takes time. What you always can do, and where help is really sorely needed, is doing translations and documentation - in some areas little technical expertise is needed, so you can instantly start working. Again: first talk to the relevant people; again see the web site at <http://www.debian.org/devel/join/> (especially the mailing lists at <http://lists.debian.org/i18n.html> and <http://lists.debian.org/debian-doc/>) > For the other suggestions, I > would like to ask you to send all manual documents, CDs related to > debian because in my organisation, we already setted up a room for > Free/Open Source Software. Debian as an organisation does not send out CDs and manuals. I am aware that big fat Internet access may not be available in your region, so your best course of action is probably - searching Linux users's groups in your wider area (and every time somebody you know travels to some location) - asking at companies/institutions in your area with decent interent connectivity if you may download Debian cd images there. That said, to really actively work on Debian, I feel a way to regularly upload and download quantities of software is quite necessary (not necessarily 100s of MBytes, but certainly tens of MBytes per week) - Debian is an Internet project, and much Software is updated regularly. Shipping CDs regularly is probably just not really a feasible long-term solution. greetings -- vbi -- Hail Eris, Hack Linux!
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