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WY025-01 Bible Tight WY025-Negus-v2.cls June 28, 2004 22:29
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Part I ✦ Getting Going
(man5), games (man6), miscellaneous components (man7), and administration
commands (man8).
✦ Info pages—Like man pages, info pages are text-based descriptions of components in
Fedora. However, the
info utility, which displays info pages, is more menu-oriented
than are man pages.
Checking Documents with man and info
The man and info commands are used to display man pages and info pages, respectively. For
example, to see the man page for the
cat command, type
# man cat
To start the info utility, you can simply type the info command. From there, scroll up and
down to find the command or other component that interests you. With the cursor on the item
you want, press Enter to display the information.
Finding Documents in Software Packages
If you would like to see what documentation is included with a particular software package,
you can use the
rpm command. For example, to see what documentation comes with the bash
shell software (bash package), you could type the following:
# rpm -qd bash |less
This command will show you any manual pages, HOWTOs, release notes, or other documents
associated with a Fedora software package.
Checking Project Sites
Nearly every project represented by software packages in Fedora has its own website, at
which you can find further information and documentation on the project. You can usually find
the address of a project’s website by checking the
README file or the RPM description that
comes with the software package in Fedora.
For example, to find out about the Rhythmbox multimedia player in Fedora, I paged through
the Rhythmbox
README file:
# less /usr/share/doc/rhythmbox-*/README
In that file, I saw that the official website is http://web.rhythmbox.org and that there is a
mailing list at
http://lists.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/rhythmbox-devel.Ifyou
can’t find information about the project’s website from its
README file, you can try listing
information about the package to find the site. For example, to list information about the
rdesktop package (a Windows NT terminal server client), you could type the following:
# rpm -qi rdesktop
Besides showing a description of the package, this command showed that the rdesktop
website is at
www.rdesktop.org. Links from this site point you to documents that describe
the protocols used in rdesktop, if you want to research further how the software works.
Getting on Fedora Mailing Lists
Many of the resources slated to support the Fedora Project were created to suit its charter to
be a community-supported Linux. While Fedora mailing lists have been churning away happily