Title: Getting Started Category: site-pages; Date: Sun Jul 05 06:53:56 IST 2015 Tags: info; admin; about; introduction; getting-started; Authors: Senthil Kumaran S (stylesen); Summary: Getting started guide for Geek Start.

Introduction

Geek Start is a community blog maintained by the community members of GNU/Linux User groups of TCE (GLUGOT). The primary purpose of this blog is to introduce GLUGOT members to collaborative development. That said, did "Geek Start" sound like "Kick Start" yes of course, we want to kick start members of GLUGOT to get into Free Software development. Geek Start is a community blog so anyone can contribute to this blog as long as:

• You are subscribed to GLUGOT mailing list
• Want to get started with Free Software development
• Have the passion to write

The following infographic explains the workflow of Geek Start at a high level.

![Geek Start Work Flow] ({filename}/images/geekstartinfographic.jpg){:width="650px"}

Download Geek Start Work Flow in PDF

Work Flow in Detail

Prerequisite

1. Working GNU/Linux machine with internet connection
2. 'git' version control system installed
3. 'make' command - available via build-essentials package in Debian based systems
4. pelican web site generator installed - use pip or Debian package python-pelican
5. python-markdown package installed

Step 1 - Join GLUGOT

Subscribe to GLUGOT mailing list with your email id. In order to subscribe to the mailing list follow the instructions available in this page https://lists.tce.edu/mailman/listinfo/glugot

Step 2 - Create GitHub Account

GitHub is a powerful collaboration, code review, and code management platform for software development. Create an account in GitHub by visiting https://github.com/ and "Sign up for GitHub".

Read more about GitHub here

Step 3 - Fork Geek Start

Sign in with your new GitHub account. The Geek Start repository URL is https://github.com/glugot/geekstart, visit the same and fork the repository. To know more on how to fork a GitHub repository see https://help.github.com/articles/fork-a-repo/

Step 4 - Clone your Fork

Clone your forked Geek Start repository to your local filesystem. To know more about cloning a repository see https://help.github.com/articles/cloning-a-repository/

NOTE: Pay attention here, do not clone the main Geek Start repository, but clone the forked (See Step 3 above) Geek Start repository.

Step 5 - Add Article

As mentioned previously, Geek Start is a community blog where anyone, who is a member of GLUGOT can add their articles which will go through a review process and gets added to http://geekstart.tce.edu/

1. Think about an interesting article
2. In your Geek Start local cloned folder, look for contents folder
3. Create a file with extension .md where you can write your article
4. We use markdown syntax for the article, to know more about markdown see https://help.github.com/articles/markdown-basics/

NOTE: Feel free to use any text editor of your choice to edit your article

Step 6 - Preview Article

Once you are done with editing your article, you can preview it by issuing the following command in your local clone of Geek Start repository:

      $ make html

The above command will create the html files along with the article you added in the output folder in the current directory. Use a web browser to view the website, for example:

     $ firefox /home/stylesen/geekstart/output/index.html

The article which you added should appear in the web browser. You can make sure if the alignment, look and feel are good.

Step 7 - Pull Request

When you are satisfied editing and previewing your article, send a pull request for the editors to review your article. Take a look at https://help.github.com/articles/creating-a-pull-request/

Step 8 - Editor Reviews

The pull request created in Step 7 will be examined by a reviewer who are part of the GLUGOT community. They will look for the following,

• Does the article consist of any offensive material?
• Is the article content plagiarised from some other material?
• Improvements if any?

Depending on the above if there are no comments, your article will be merged to the main Geek Start repository and eventually will get published to http://geekstart.tce.edu/. If there are comments, then the reviewer will communicate the same using GitHub review mechanism which will be intimated to you via an email registered as part of your GitHub account.

Read more on GitHub review process in this link https://help.github.com/articles/using-pull-requests/#reviewing-the-pull-request

Step 9 - Article Published

The publishing to http://geekstart.tce.edu happens via an automated script, which runs every 3 hours and publishes the website contents as seen in Geek Start's master GitHub repository.

Getting Help

• Email your questions to "glugot at lists dot tce dot edu" with '[geekstart]' tag on the subject line.
• We are available in #geekstart IRC channel on irc.freenode.net

Suggested Reading

• About GLUGOT
• Producing Open Source Software
• Git Tutorial
• Pelican Documentation