To take a guided tour of info , type:
$ info info
4.2.1.4. Viewing GNOME guides and KDE manuals
GNOME and KDE each provide a general user's guide or manual, with specific chapters (or in some cases, separate manuals) for their various desktop tools.
To access these guides, just press F1 in a GNOME or KDE application. Alternately, select the System→Help (GNOME) or Help (KDE) menu options from the panel bar. The GNOME menu is connected to the GNOME documentation, and the KDE menu is connected to the KDE documentation. You can access the documentation for the other desktop environment from a command prompt; for GNOME documentation, use either of these commands:
$ gnome-help
$ yelp
For KDE documentation:
$ khelpcenter
Each of these tools also provides a graphical user interface for viewing manpages and info documents.
4.2.1.5. Accessing HOWTOs and guides
The Linux Documentation Project (TLDP) maintains a very helpful set of documents called HOWTO s, each of which describes the procedure to accomplish a specific task. They also publish some book-length guides . Most of these documents have been translated into multiple languages. However, these documents are generic and do not reflect the default configuration and packaging of Fedora.
The TLDP documentation can be found on the Web at http://www.tldp.org/ . TLDP also publishes FAQs and maintains links to online versions of the manpages and free Linux magazines.
4.2.1.6. Viewing text files distributed with applications
Most open source software packages include a small number of text files written by the programmers, which include licensing information, change histories, errata and bug lists, and release notes. In Fedora these miscellaneous documents are placed in /usr/share/doc and are organized in directories by package name and version. For example, the notes for dia (a diagram-drawing application) are available in /usr/share/doc/dia-0.95 .
I find that the easiest way to view these documents is to use a web browser, which enables you to navigate among directories and view documents by simply clicking on them. To do this, just open the Firefox web browser and enter /usr/share/doc as the location.
To view these files from the shell prompt, change to the directory you wish to view, and then use ls to list names of the files and less to view the contents of any text files that interest you. For example, here are the steps you might take to view the dia text files:
$ cd /usr/share/doc
$ ls -d dia*
dia-0.95 dialog-1.0.20050306
$ cd dia-0.95
$ ls -l
total 724
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1578 Aug 16 2004 AUTHORS
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 574015 Aug 17 2004 ChangeLog
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 17992 Mar 12 2004 COPYING
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 11364 Aug 16 2004 custom-shapes
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1620 Aug 16 2004 diagram.dtd
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3927 Aug 16 2004 INSTALL
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4955 Aug 16 2004 KNOWN_BUGS
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 21535 Aug 17 2004 NEWS
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3444 Aug 16 2004 README
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Sep 27 01:13 samples
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2324 Aug 16 2004 shape.dtd
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 501 Aug 16 2004 sheet.dtd
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1379 Aug 19 2004 THANKS
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2545 Aug 16 2004 TODO
$ less KNOWN_BUGS
The less command will enable you to scroll through the specified file ( KNOWN_BUGS ) in the same way that you would move through a manpage, using the arrow keys and Page Up/Page Down keys to scroll and q to quit.
Note that this directory also contains a sample directory, which includes some sample files for use with the dia program.
4.2.2. What About...
4.2.2.1. ...printing a manpage?
The man command's -t option will format a page into PostScript; you can then send the PostScript output to your printer with the command lpr using a pipe. This command prints the manpage for ls :
$ man -t ls | lpr
4.2.2.2. ...making a PDF or HTML version of a manpage?
It's easy to convert manpages into PDF or HTML formats.
For PDF, use the -t option with man and then pipe the PostScript output into the ps2pdf program. This command places the manpage for ls into the file ls_man_page.pdf :
$ man -t ls | ps2pdf - ls_man_page.pdf
The commands to convert a manpage to HTML are more complex:
$ zcat $(man --path ls ) | man2html | tail +3 > ls_man_page.html
This uses man --path to find the compressed, unformatted manual page; zcat to decompress the page; man2html to convert the page to HTML; and tail to strip off the unneeded httpd Content-type header.
4.2.3. Where Can I Learn More?
Other sources of information about Fedora and Linux:
The Fedora Project at RedHat: http://fedora.redhat.com/
The Fedora Project Wiki: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/
The Fedora Forums: http://www.fedoraforum.org/
Links to Linux-related news at LinuxToday: http://linuxtoday.com/