LXer: Falko, your tutorials show up on just about every Linux system administration search I do these days. When did you start writing them?

Falko: I started the “Perfect Setup” tutorials in 2003 as part of the 42go ISP-Manager documentation. At projektfarm GmbH in Lüneburg, we had developed the Linux web server control panel called “42go ISP-Manager”, and though we had an installation manual for it, we got lots of support requests from people that had no idea how to install the base system for 42go.

At that point I decided “Ok, let's write a tutorial that covers every single step of the system installation and configuration so that people can simply copy and paste the commands from the tutorial so that 42go runs on these systems out of the box.”

First, we put those tutorials (we started with Debian Woody) on projektfarm.com and also on my personal web site falkotimme.com. We noticed that we got a lots of page views from our tutorials. We even had visits from people that weren't interested in 42go at all, so we thought that there's a need for the kind of tutorial we wrote.

We created HowtoForge in 2005 as a source for high-quality tutorials, and it's open for everyone. Anyone can contribute. I don't test every tutorial that gets submitted, but I test my own tutorials to verify that they don't contain errors or that I don't omit small but important details.