Linux on Power.. links and portals..

Several of us were playing around recently counting up how many "portals" we could find for information in and around Linux for Power systems. On the performance side, we were specifically interested in seeing whether there was information "out there" that we could leverage that we weren't really aware of. We actually found a lot of performance information which I'll try to highlight more in the weeks coming.

For the portals, we did find an amazing assortment of web pages available. We hit classic marketing portals, hardware and performance information, generic Linux information, technical portals, a couple of old and outdated portals, various download sites for added-value items, lots of IBM forums on developerWorks, IBM Redbooks (always good information), and pointers to wiki pages spanning a number of subjects.

The marketing and customer teams generally point to the IBM Linux page as the primary entry point (portal). The five web tabs out there (Overview, Getting Started, Solutions, About Linux, and Resources) can get the reader to all sorts of official information.

For our list of web sites and pages, rather than just file the list in another email bucket never to be seen again, we created an index page called Quick Links to keep track of what we wanted to hunt down and get updated and more current. We naturally didn't want to call it another portal. 'Course, now we're hunting down subject-matter experts (aka volunteers) to help update the various wiki pages, especially under the developerWorks Linux for Power architecture wiki. We're particularly interested in providing more of the practical details, one example being the HPC Central - Red Hat page where a series of technical wiki pages are available.

Another interesting observation is seeing IBM's classic reliance on the developerWorks forums which we listed on our Quick Links index page. The Linux community is far more used to mailing lists for interactions, questions, and development issues. Forums are fine for questions and answers, but in our mind many of the forums are rarely used, even if the technology or product covered by each forum is helpful and useful. I would expect that we'll start seeding the forums with answers to questions we get from customers, developers, and peers. Help nudge things along. Which will give us more places to link to and get the practical questions answered.

[edit'ed 10/30/2008 - we made the Quick Links page the LinuxP home page]