Other System Documentation

If I asked any computer user today where they would go for documentation on Unix or linux, the answer they would universally give would be "Google". Good idea. However, as anyone knows who has had to ask a specific complicated or detailed question the answer you want can be very hard to find. Besides, there is no guarantee that the documentation you find corresponds to the version of software you have on your machine. A better first stop is always the documentation that was written with your package. Now that the same HTML documentation is being used for both the Internet and the local machine and storage has less of a restriction, having a copy of your software's actual documentation stored locally is common.

You may recall our discussion of a distribution tree during our study of the man system. When a software package is installed, it may include a standard set of HTML documentation. If so, that documentation is placed in its own subdirectory under /usr/share/doc. If you list that directory you will find subdirectories for many of the software packages installed on your machine. The majority of these directories just contain stubs - in other words, the directory is created, but it only contains minimal documentation such as text README files. With each release of linux, however, more and more complete documentation appears in these locations, making a huge amount of documentation available on your machine - even if the Internet is currently unavailable! And the README files often point to the Internet location of the master documentation.

You may have to do a bit of searching for the package you want, since the subdirectories are named for the package rather than the command. For example, the documentation on ssh is in openssh-5.3p1

In addition, here are the master locations of the documentation for two of our most popular distributions:

Ubuntu: https://help.ubuntu.com

Redhat: http://docs.redhat.com  (or use file:///usr/share/doc/HTML/en-US/index.html on a Redhat system)

A huge amount of documentation is freely available on Redhat's website above in both PDF and HTML format. With the advent of RH7, the PDF files Redhat provides have become incredibly useful, although finding which document contains the information you want can be a bit of a challenge.

A subset of the redhat documents should be available under /pub/cs/gboyd in a PDFs directory (named for the version) on both hills and the linux subnet.

In addition, a large number of forums are available for asking and researching linux questions. The most popular of these are the Ubuntu forums.