man, info/usr/share/doc, HOWTOs and FAQs
V 0.4.3 - Tue, 11 Apr 2006 21:43:40 +0200
To be found under
http://sourcepole.com/sources/tips/howto-find-answers.html. German version:
http://sourcepole.com/sources/tips/antwort-findungs-howto.html.
(copyleft) T.Pospisek <tpo_hp at sourcepole.ch>
Published in honour of the www.lugs.ch
Thanks for contributions to:
Martin Ebnöther, Neil Franklin, Philipp Frauenfelder, Hans Zoebelein,
Andreas Burger
This HOWTO is meant to answer a category of Frequently Asked Questions or short
FAQS: what can I do, when I have problems with or questions concerning Linux?
It was created to help Linux newbies who often don't know how to solve a
problem and are risking their reputation when asking FAQs on public internet
sites.
First one should try to understand the problem as thoroughly and precisely as
possible. Log files are a place to look for data points. This is usually
already of great help and one often learns more about the problem at hand.
It's a good idea to first search the local information sources:
man and info pages, the HOWTOs and documents under
/usr/share/doc.
If this doesn't lead to success, one can, as a further step, search the
internet.
Lastly one can also ask people.
Each information source is described below in detail. Demanding on the kind of
the question, some information sources are more or less fit for scrutiny. For
newbies it's recommended to have a look at each of these ressources, to get an
overview of the possibilities s/he has and to get a feel which kind of
questions a particular ressource would be most fit to answer.
Allmost all log files are located in the directory /var/log.
The exact logs to be found there differ from distribution to distribution
and depend on the configuration. Often there's a kern.log that
contains messages from the Linux kernel, a daemon.log for
server processes and messages, which is often a superset of
the other log files that is it contains a part of the messages that appear
in other log files.
A close study of the log files can often reveal what is happening at the
moment in the system and what the view of the various programms and
components of the problem is.
A good start for a Linux beginer is a complete Linux Distribuition with a handbook. An index of Linux Distributions can be found on Distrowatch. Additionaly there's a wide spectrum of Books for nearly every aspect of Linux available at every (online) bookshop, to be found under the keyword Linux. Online bookshops can be found through your next Searchengine.
man, info
Most commands (to be found under
(/usr)/(s)bin) and
configuration files (to be found under /etc) have corresponding
man (like manual) or info pages. To find out
something about the command ls for example, one can enter
man ls or info ls on the command line. It's useful
to be learn about the help commands and their possibilities themselves with
man man and info info. pinfo features
a info interface that can be navigated like a browser.
Some commands provide also a short description about themselves, which can
usualy be accessed with the options -h, -? or
--help, like man -h for example.
/usr/share/doc, HOWTOs and FAQs
On most systems /usr/share/doc contains additional information
about various commands, subsystems, indications about configuration, HOWTOs
and FAQs.
HOWTOs which stands for "how to" (..do something) usualy describe complex
problems, like the installation of the system, the configuration of TCP/IP
etc. The official site of the Linux HOWTOs is the Linux Documentation Project.
FAQs are collections of frequently asked questions. Mailing lists and
newsgroups as well as komplex software packages often have corresponding
FAQ collections. It's a good advice to have a quick glance on the contents of
such FAQs before asking questions on a newsgroup or a mailing list. The Internet FAQ Archives provide a
large collection of FAQs.
When needing to configure programms a glance into /etc comes
often handy. This directory should contain all global configuration files.
Those include often comments and default seting which can be adapted, with
a bit of imagination, to provide the wanted configuration.
To ask a friend - in the large sense of the word - is often the simplest thing in the world. This' got some disadvantages:
If you don't know any other Linux user, it's worth to have a look on Linux Org, to see ifi there's are linux user groups in your vicinity. These do often organise weekly or monthly reunions where you can exchange knowledge or ask other users and they usualy have mailing lists. Of course the above said applies here equally well.
Another possibility to ask directly other people is throuh IRC or Inter Relay Chat. Some of the IRC channels are geared towards newbies, like f.ex. #linuxhelp or #linpeople on the openproject.org server or towards various Linux distributions, like #debian and #redhat. It's good to find out which is your next IRC server, that carries the mentioned channels. More info about IRC can be found on ircHelp.
Since one is often not alone having a particular problem, one can try and
search all the available newsgroups with the help of DejaNews to see, if somebody else had
already asked the same question already and what the answers were. In that
sense Deja News is something like a Meta-FAQ. For some sorts of questions,
like configuration and compatibility of some exotic hard- and software, Deja
News is the beste information source. Allthough Deja News has been here for a
long time, it's quite unknown to many people.
The Deja News archives have been taken over by Google.
It's fundamentaly importany to learn, how to entrer and refine queries. It is
very recommended, for the ability to use other search machines as well (see
below), to read the online instructions of the search engine. The time spent
reading it is easily saved when not having to scroll through thousands
of found references. Besides - the query syntax of most of the search engines
has merged over time, so one can expect to be able to use unknown engines
immediately.
Web search engines are, well-fed, very useful tools. Google has various specialised search pages, among others for Linux.
Knowledgebases like the SuSE Support Database or the Printing HOWTO Support Database are idealy suited to answer questions about hardware compatibiliy.
Questions like "is there a software that ..." are idealy fit for software
indexes. Freshmeat or
Linux Software Map are up to date
and pretty complete.
One can also have a look at Sourceforge
since it is hosting a huge number of projects.
When looking for themes like "Linux and graphics" the best starting point to
look is general linux sites. Following links one can pretty quickly approach
the wanted subject area and ends up on the interesting pages. In general it is
advised to find one self a few good general linux pages and to visit them
occasionaly to see what's happened in the meantime. Suggestions:
Linux Weekly Notes,
Linux Org, ...
Those Linux sites do also contain many excellent alternatives to all the
ressources presented here.
Mailing lists are useful when having questions on specialised subjects. Mailing lists are interesting above all because of the fact, that the people subscribed to the lists are concerned with very tighly defined subject areas and therefore can be expected to be competent. The fundamental problem with mailing lists is the same as with normal emails: nobody is eager to read SPAM - sending SPAM to people can have catastophic consequences. What is regarded as SPAM depends a lot on the recipient - one can say that everything one recieves unaskedly and is not interested in tends into the category of SPAM. From this follows clearly how to behave on mailing lists:
The same rules aply to newsgroups because they can be regarded as public mailing lists (!). Since nobody has to subscribe to a newsgroup to read or post, the quality of newsgroups varies a lot. This is often a consequence of noncompilance of posters to the above mentioned rules. Smaller newsgroups though are often an interesting ressource for questions.
When - or even before writing a programm that solves a certain problem, it's convenient to hold on and ask whether there are other programms that solve it. Sources of most available software packages can be found on the sites of the big distributions like RedHat, Debian or on local Sunsite/Metalab mirrors. Use the Open Source!