Hello everyone,

I have been using Alpine on servers for 1-2 years and on my primary
laptop for a few months now and have run into quite a few instances of
missing newbie-friendly documentation that made me write my own along
the way and publish it to my web/gemini site.

This made me think about Alpine's documentation in general and how to
improve it or make it more accessible, in which the wiki should play a
key role in my opinion. For this reason I was thinking of contributing
contents from my own articles/guides and notes to Alpine's official
wiki to improve the general documentation situation instead of just
having it buried on my site. My site is open source (MIT) and its
contents are licensed with CC-BY-SA 4.0, which is compatible with the
wiki's licensing.

Guides I have written already or have substantial notes on include:
* Detailed beginner's installation walkthrough
* Finding and reading documentation (manpages)
* Basic system hardening (creating user, configuring doas, hardening
sshd, ...)
* Basic awall configuration
* Installing Nextcloud
* Basic WireGuard VPN setup with awall
* UEFI setup with rEFInd
* Installing on encrypted ZFS root

All of these are targeted at newbies or at least people who are new to
Alpine linux and try to assume as little as possible about the readers
previous knowledge. I believe these guides would be great for beginners
to have solid starting points in many directions, which I and others I
have talked to have struggled with while getting into Alpine. There is
very much to love about Alpine, especially since its simplicity makes
it a wonderful tool for learning in theory, but documentation is not
one of its strengths. :)

The reason why I am writing all this here is because I am not sure if
there is interest from Alpine's existing userbase and whether you would
welcome this kind of "here's an article from my site" contribution.
Where wiki pages already exist (eg. Alpine on ZFS), I will of course try
to incorporate my writing with the existing information to prevent more
duplicates or abandoned articles.

I'd be happy to hear your thoughts on this, you can see this article as
an example for a wordy newbie guide I have written:
https://regrow.earth/diy-server/awall.html

Best,
Edin

> The reason why I am writing all this here is because I am not sure if
> there is interest from Alpine's existing userbase and whether you would
> welcome this kind of "here's an article from my site" contribution.
> Where wiki pages already exist (eg. Alpine on ZFS), I will of course try
> to incorporate my writing with the existing information to prevent more
> duplicates or abandoned articles.
i see no issue with it- if you simply fill in the wiki with stuff you
wrote yourself elsewhere (duplicated in a sense), then it should only
improve the state of the aforementioned lacking documentation :)

> I'd be happy to hear your thoughts on this, you can see this article as
> an example for a wordy newbie guide I have written:
> https://regrow.earth/diy-server/awall.html
i found this to be quite well written actually! i have never used awall
before, but now i know where to start if i ever do :)

-- alice

> i see no issue with it- if you simply fill in the wiki with stuff you
> wrote yourself elsewhere (duplicated in a sense), then it should only
> improve the state of the aforementioned lacking documentation :)

> i found this to be quite well written actually! i have never used awall
> before, but now i know where to start if i ever do :)

Thank you for your positive feedback, I'm glad to hear that!
If you have any suggestions for improvements or changes, I'd be happy to
incorporate them too, because I am also somewhat of a self-taught
newbie. I am basically writing this for myself from a year ago. :)

Best,
Edin