I'd suggest, or really second as this idea has already been put forth that we begin by opening channels of communication between us and others in similer endeavors.
 

 

That sounds like a good idea. Question of whether other projects are as interested in co-opertive efforts.  

Documentation, coding and all other aspects. It's volenteers doing the work. So people as they are able and willing to produce bits and pieces, the weak spot of Open Source.  How can you set a deadline on somebody doing things purely out of good will?  They have to pay bills first. Many companies have generously donated the services of employees to work on OS  projects on company time. That has helped tremendously. I think that may be the best route. Companies that depend on OSS efforts can see the clear benifits in allowing people to work part time on OSS projects. Promoting this may be a way to give people more time for OSS projects.
 

I found that distros based on the Red Hat model like Mandriva, Knoppix, Cent OS and SUSE to have quite a bit in common and very little difference. I can sit down at a Mandriva machine and forget what distro I am on.  SUSE has noticable differences but most things run exactly like they do on Fedora. The tools vary some in the GUI. Especially for system maintenance. If you go to the configuration files they look almost exactly the same.

I havn't installed Ubuntu so I have little idea on the differences.  I installed the most recent Debian distro a few years back when my company was deciding on what distro to move too after Red Hat split into Enterprise and Fedora. There were some noticable differences in many areas but the core of it was just plain Linux like any other distro I've worked with. The big diffences were again in the GUI and system tools like package managers. I also tried out Free BSD, a Gentoo distro, SUSE, Mandriva and a couple less well known distros. Free BSD had the most differences obviously since it was not Linux. Still even between Linux and BSD there was a core feel that was easy to adapt too. Unlike Solaris which did some rather odd things in my opinion.  ls is ls, df is df. /etc was /etc while you might find a few things moved around the core of it stayed the same. The differences seemed to be things like tarball vrs rpm vrs apt-get and the many other variations on how to install an app.  The GUI or lack there of for configuring a file that is identical or nearly identical in various distros.

I think that a common documentation project would help bring the best of each distro to other distros. I wouldn't be surprised to see package managers like yum and apt-get agree on a common interface. The internals might be different but standardizing the interface for the best usability would make it easier for all.  Many GUI apps are distro independent. So while under the hood there are differences, to the end user the distro is transparent while using a tool like grip or the desktop itself whether it be Gnome or KDE or a lightweight window manger or while not running X at all. Apache is apache, MySQL is MySQL. The location might be different for the files but the files are the same and what you do with those apps and files are the same.
 

That is the question. The politics and the my distro is better than your distro kind of thing. Another set of politics is old school Nix vrs new school Nix. That's a knot to resolve.

 

One of the beauties of Linux is the freedom of choice and the ability of each and every user to build a machine that fits them like a glove.  What is a great way of doing things for one person may be a horrible way of doing it for another. Lyx might be a great tool for some. Others will prefer to work in HTML based technologies.

The solution is simple. A standardized output format that allows people to use what tools suite them best in the creation then they merely export to the needed format or submit a common format to be converted to the standardized format.
 

The easy way is to create it and let them come. If we created a tool like an X version of info that covered all aspects of Linux, then it would be fairly simple to attach distro specific flags to areas. To denote in common documentation variations between distros or if for example your sitting there at your desktop on a Fedora machine helping a Mandriva user you can switch to a Mandriva centric view of the documentation.  Each distro's documenation projects responsible for contributions to the project as a whole.