Chapter 11. Getting support for Debian GNU/Linux

60

/usr/share/man/man3/, and it can be called by executing the command:

man 3 foo

,

or just

man foo

if section 3 is the first one containing a page on

foo

.

One can learn which directory of

/usr/share/man/

contains a certain manual page by

executing

man  w foo

.

New Debian users should note that the 'man' pages of many general system commands

are not available until they install these packages:

man db

, which contains the

man

program itself, and other programs for manipulat 

ing the manual pages.

manpages

, which contains the system manual pages. (see `How does Debian sup 

port non English languages?' on page

15

).

  GNU style `info' pages: User documentation for many commands, particularly GNU

tools, is available not in `man' pages, but in `info' files which can be read by the GNU

tool

info

, by running

M x info

within GNU Emacs, or with some other Info page

viewer.

Its main advantage over the original `man' pages are that it is a hypertext system. It

does not require the WWW, however;

info

can be run from a plain text console. It was

designed by Richard Stallman and preceded the WWW.

Note that you may access a lot of documentation on your system by using a WWW browser,

through `dwww' or `dhelp' commands, found in respective packages.

11.2 Are there any on line resources for discussing Debian?

Yes. In fact, the main method of support Debian provides to our users is by the way of email.

11.2.1 Mailing lists

There

are

a

lot

of

Debian related

mailing

lists

(

http://www.debian.org/

MailingLists/

).

On a system with the

doc debian

package installed there is a complete list of mailing lists in

/usr/share/doc/debian/mailing lists.txt

.

Debian mailing lists are named following the pattern debian list subject. Examples are debian 

announce, debian user, debian news. To subscribe to any list debian list subject, send mail to

debian list subject request@lists.debian.org with the word  subscribe  in the Subject: header.

Be sure to remember to add  request to the email address when using this method to subscribe

or unsubscribe. Otherwise your email will go to the list itself, which could be embarrassing or

annoying, depending on your point of view.

If you have a forms capable World Wide Web browser, you can subscribe to mailing lists

using the WWW form (

http://www.debian.org/MailingLists/subscribe

).

You