| Ways to Contribute |
We often get e-mails from people asking how they can help make DistroWatch a better resource for the community. This page covers some of the tasks people can perform to help us keep DistroWatch useful and up to date.
- Auditing the waiting list
- Finding inactive distributions
- Funding / Donations
- Submit Headlines story
- Submit new distributions
- Rate a distribution
- Create a simplified manual page
- Writing articles
- Translations
Auditing the waiting list
At any given time we have about 250 distributions on our waiting list. Some of them have been abandoned, others are probably mature and ready to be added to our database. It takes time to keep checking on the projects on our waiting list to see if a distribution has grown or been discontinued.
Please go through our waiting list and look for any projects which are no longer active. If the project's website has been taken down or if the project has not published a new release in the past four years, then let us know the distribution has been abandoned. On the other hand, if you find a distribution that has been on our waiting list for over a year, has a recent release, a mailing list and complete documentation, feel free to e-mail us with the name and URL of the distribution so we can consider adding it to our database.
* * * * * Finding inactive distributions
We have a few hundred active distributions in our database and some of them cease to be maintained. If you notice a distribution has been discontinued or a project has been inactive for five years, e-mail us and let us know the distribution is inactive. Please be sure to let us know why the distribution appears to be inactive. For example, if no news has been posted on the project's website, please tell us that along with a link to the project's news page so we can verify the report.
* * * * * Funding / Donations
Money allows us to keep the DistroWatch servers running, dedicate time to working on the site and donate to open source projects that can use some help. If you would like to help us, please consider sending us a few dollars or bitcoins.
* * * * * Submit Headlines story
Our Headlines page is where we post distribution news and package updates during the week. Stories appearing on the Headlines page are designed to be short and to the point, keeping readers abreast of recent developments in the open source community.
Developers, project managers and interested parties who would like to have news items posted on our Headlines page can send us stories via e-mail. Please make sure the subject line of the e-mail includes the word Headlines and the body of the e-mail includes the story you wish you have posted.
When submitting a story for our Headlines page, please include at least one URL to an original source, such as a project's blog, social media page or mailing list so we can verify the story. Submissions without an original source will not be accepted. Third-party blogs or news sources will not be treated as original sources.
* * * * * Submit new distributions
Have you created a new distribution or open source operating system? Do you know of a Linux or BSD-based project not in our database or on our waiting list? Then please let us know about it! A list of guidelines and information we will find useful for evaluating new projects can be found on our Submit Distribution page.
* * * * * Rate a distribution
Have you tried a distribution recently and have opinions on it? Then please head over to our Ratings page and let us known your thoughts. Rating and posting a mini-review will help other readers find distributions which suit their needs.
* * * * * Create a simplified manual page
One of the resources we provide is a collection of simplified manual pages which attempts to clearly explain how command line tools work with examples.
There are hundreds of command line utilities and we would like to add more simplified manual pages to our collection. If you are familiar with a program we do not have in our simplified manual pages collection, please write up one for us. A manual page should have a one- or two-line description along with a few examples of how the program is commonly used. Do not worry about the formatting of the document, we will adjust the lines and formating as required. Just e-mail us your simplified manual page.
* * * * * Writing articles
Each week we run two columns of unique content, one which answers questions, provides tutorials and offers tips for using Linux and BSD systems. The other column reviews distributions or related resources such as books and open source applications. If you are a wordsmith who likes exploring open source operating systems and telling people about your experiences, then we want to hear from you.
Before writing your review or tutorial, please e-mail us and let us know what subject you plan to cover. We want to avoid having multiple people review the same distribution or writing tutorials we have published before.
Some additional notes for writers: We like documents written in Open Document Format or HTML. Screen shots should be in a resolution of about 1280x1024 or larger, if possible. We can scale down images as needed.
* * * * * Translations
DistroWatch is read by people all around the world and we try to make the website accessible to as many people as possible. If you know English and one or more other languages, please help us translate this website.
The text files below contain a list of commonly used words and phrases used on this website. Each dictionary of phrases is listed below with its country code. On the left side of the file is a variable name and on the right is a word or phrase. Please translate the text on the right side of the = sign to the language of your choice and e-mail it to us. The original Englih translations, for reference, are in this text file.
| |
|
• 
• 
• 
