V 0.3.0 - Wed May 19 13:27:58 CEST 1999
To be found under
http://spin.ch/~tpo/linux/howto-find-answers.html. German version:
http://spin.ch/~tpo/linux/antwort-findungs-howto.html.
(copyleft) T.Pospisek <tpo@spin.ch>
Published in honour of the lugs, grin.
Thanks for contributions to:
Martin Ebnöther <ventilator@parodia.ch>,
Neil Franklin <neil@arch.ethz.ch>,
Philipp Frauenfelder <pfrauenf@debian.org>
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. 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, since internet
access usualy costs: man and info pages, the HOWTOs and documents under
/usr/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.
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".
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.
On most systems /usr/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:
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.
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.
Alta Vista, Lycos etc. are useful, but there exist specialised, theme oriented search engines. Some that cover Linux are: Google, Search Linux and 1st Linux Search. These do not only search web sites but also newsgroups and partly also archived mailing lists.
Questions like "is there a software that ..." are idealy fit for software indexes. Freshmeat or Linux Now! are up to date, pretty complete and come, as Linux Now! does with a good search engine.
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:
Kernelnotes,
Linux HQ,
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. It is relatively difficult to get a answer to a question on some ilarge groups like for example comp.os.linux.networking. 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!