News November 2001: New Format, New Content and Vendor Neutral Certification

This month's release marks a dramatic change of direction for the Linux Training Materials Project.

Instead of adding directly to the existing body of Linux training course notes, this month's release will be the first in an entirely new series. This new series aims to replace all of our existing Linux course notes, over a period of a year or so.

Linux Certification

The most dramatic and time-consuming change involves re-authoring our courseware so that it satisfies the objectives of all popular Linux certification schemes. First releases of all new lecture notes and exercises will focus on the Linux Professional Institute (LPI) family of exams. Subsequent module revisions will flag and or add content to cover CompTIA (Linux+), Red Hat (RHCE) and Sair certification schemes.

We have chosen LPI certification as our first target, because it provides the kind of open, low-cost, robust, intellectually rigorous and vendor-neutral framework which we have come to associate with GNU/Linux and open source software.

XML-based Portable Document Format

All new course modules will be released in PDF format. The shift from LaTeX sources should speed up module production time, provide foils with more graphic appeal, enable platform-independent viewing and printing as well avoiding the overhead of learning LaTeX in order to use our materials.

These new Linux training materials are all written in XML – the emerging standard for vendor-neutral data exchange and transformation. The source code for new modules will be published as soon as the Perl tools for building them have reached publicly releasable quality. When the build tools are publicly available, they will be released under an open source licence (probably the GPL).

PDF versions of the old training materials will remain downloadable from http://www.linuxtraining.co.uk until every module has been replaced by certification-oriented content.