A Web-Based Installation Manual Management System for Open Source Software

Recently, Open Source Software (OSS) has become commonly used at many places. Unfortunately, although the use of OSS is often hard for novice users, many OSSes have few good manuals. To solve this problem, we have proposed a method of automatically generating a Web-based installation manual for an OSS by editing the log information recorded during the installation process by a skilled user. However, this method has another problem of requiring several manuals even for the same OSS, because installation commands may be different depending on the installation environment such as Linux distributions and versions. In addition, novice users sometimes make input mistakes during installation process that cannot be detected by themselves. In this paper, we propose a Web-based system to manage the created manuals so that users can easily use them. By incorporating the analogous manual search algorithm after investigating command changes under different environments, our system is able to show similar manuals if no existing manual matches to the search condition. Besides, we propose the installation guidance function to avoid mistakes by users. It monitors the input commands by a user, and displays the correct commands with the error message if a mistake is found. The experimental results in installing OSS packages by novice users confirm the effectiveness our proposal.