one of my co-workers gave me some good advice.

Keep track of changes you make to your config files with rcs.

Go GNU.

So I'm getting the new version of the MaxDB FAQ ready for production. We used Microsoft Word to create the document and manage corrections. And then I exported to HTML. Word did a terrific (note that the root word here is "terror") job of translating to HTML, and Tidy won't touch it unless I fix some issues manually.

So here I go.

Getting most recent build from cvs:

$ cd ~/src/
$ cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/tidy login
$ cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/tidy co tidy

Building said code:

$ cd tidy/build/gmake
$ make

ld: archive: ../../lib/libtidy.a has no table of contents, add one with ranlib(1) (can't load from it)
make: *** [../../bin/tidy] Error 1

$ ranlib ../../lib/libtidy.a
$ make

Running code:

$ cd ../../bin
$ ./tidy -h
$ open ../htmldoc/faq.html …

To install sudo on a debian or ubuntu system with a bash shell (this is likely you if you're reading this), change to the root user thus:

$ su -

Now that you have a "#" shell, all commands you run will be privileged. You don't want this. Trust me. Instead, you want to run most commands as your usual user and only use privileged commands when you have no other choice. To do this, I recommend installing sudo.

# apt-get install sudo

When this program finishes installing, and you are again presented with a "#" shell, do the last thing you will ever do from that shell. In the following example, "<your username>" represents the username of your non-privileged user.

# echo '<your username>  ALL=(ALL) ALL' >> /etc/sudoers

If you substituted <your username> correctly, you will …