Proposal: Improving Documentation by Capturing Frequently Asked Questions
Objective:
Enhance the usability and relevance of the GhostBSD documentation by integrating a curated FAQ-style section that captures recurring support topics from forums and user queries, with precise, tested answers.
Rationale:
Many questions on the forums (e.g., how to mount a drive, how to install a package, how to enable WiFi) are repeated frequently. This indicates gaps in visibility, discoverability, or clarity within the current documentation. Rather than relying on forums, which are impermanent and fragmented, to answer these questions, they should be distilled into structured, versioned documentation.
Implementation Plan:
Create a New FAQ Section in ReadTheDocs
- Title: “Frequently Asked Tasks” or “Common How-Tos”
- Organise by category (e.g., Storage, Networking, Power Management, Audio)
Capture Forum and Community Questions
Actively monitor the Flarum forums for recurring technical questions.
Summarise the question clearly.
Provide step-by-step, GhostBSD-tested instructions with command-line examples.
Example Entry – Mounting a Drive:
Title: How to Mount a Drive in GhostBSD
Overview:
Drives are not always auto-mounted in GhostBSD. This guide explains how to mount common filesystems manually.
Steps:
A. Identify the device:
ls /dev/da*
camcontrol devlist
B. Check the filesystem type:
file -s /dev/da0p1
C. Mount (UFS example):
sudo mount -t ufs /dev/da0p1 /mnt
D. Mount (ext4 via fusefs):
sudo pkg install fusefs-ext2
sudo kldload fuse
sudo mkdir /mnt/usb
sudo mount -t ext2fs -o rw /dev/da0p1 /mnt/usb
E. Unmounting:
sudo umount /mnt
Note: ext4 is read-only unless mounted with fuse-ext2 with -o rw+ and risks data corruption.
Cross-Link Relevant Pages
- Link the FAQ to broader topics (e.g., "Storage Management in GhostBSD" or "Accessing USB Devices").
Keep Forum Threads Short-Term
- Encourage users to summarise resolved questions into documentation pull requests or tagged forum posts for triage.
Version and Maintain
- Tag instructions based on GhostBSD version compatibility.
- Mark deprecated methods with notes.
