Support

Documentation

Several documentation sources:

  • HOWTOs, short documents on precise points (usually far from what we need here, but sometimes useful). Look on your disk in /usr/share/doc/HOWTO (not always, they are sometimes elsewhere; check that out with the command locate HOWTO),

  • The manual pages. Type man <command> to get documentation on the command <command>,

  • Specialized literature. Several large publishers have begun publishing books about free systems (especially on GNU/Linux). It is often useful if you are a beginner and if you do not understand all the terms of the present documentation.

Technical support

If you have bought an “officialMandrake Linux distribution, you can ask the technical support staff for information on your system.

You can also rely on help from the free software community:

  • newsgroups (on Usenet) comp.os.linux.* answer all the questions about GNU/Linux. Newsgroups matching comp.os.bsd.* deal with BSD systems. There may be other newsgroups dealing with other UNIX systems. Remember to read them for some time prior to writing to them.

  • Several associations or groups of enthusiasts in the free software community offer voluntary support. The best way to find the ones closest to you, is to check out the lists on specialized web sites, or to read the relevant newsgroups for a while.

  • Several IRC channels offer a real time (but blind) assistance by gurus. See for instance the #linux channel on most of the IRC network, or #linuxhelp on IRCNET.

  • As a last resort, ask the developer of the software (if he mentioned his name and his email address in a file of the distribution) if you are sure that you have found a bug (which may be due only to your architecture, but after all, free software is supposed to be portable).

How to find free software

To find free software, a lot of links may help you:

  • the huge FTP site sunsite.unc.edu or one of its mirrors

  • the following web sites make a catalog of many free software that can be used on UNIX platforms (but one can also find proprietary software on these):

    • FreshMeat is probably the most complete site,

    • SourceForge.net is the world's largest Open Source software development web site, with the largest repository of Open Source code and applications available on the Internet.

    • GNU Software for an exhaustive list of all of GNU software. Of course, all of them are free and most are licensed under the GPL,

  • you can also perform a search with a search engine like Google/ and Lycos/ and make a request like: +<software>+download or "download software".