http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/installmanual
.
Get it from the debian-policy
package, or at http://www.debian.org/doc/devel-manuals#policy
.
doc-linux
installs all of the most recent versions of the HOWTOs and mini-HOWTOs from the
Linux Documentation Project
.
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:
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.
Yes. In fact, the main method of support Debian provides to our users is by the way of email.
There are a lot of Debian-related mailing
lists
.
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
. You
can also un-subscribe using a WWW form
.
The list manager's e-mail address is listmaster@lists.debian.org
,
in case you have any trouble.
Archives of the Debian mailing lists are available via WWW at http://lists.debian.org/
.
When using the Debian mailing lists, please follow these rules:
Debian mailing list advertising
policy
.
Users can address questions to individual package maintainers using email. To reach a maintainer of a package called xyz, send email to xyz@packages.debian.org.
Users should post non-Debian-specific questions to one of the Linux USENET
groups, which are named comp.os.linux.* or linux.*. There are several lists of
Linux Usenet newsgroups and other related resources on the WWW, e.g. on the
Linux Online
and LinuxJournal
sites.
There is a variety of search engines that serve documentation related to Debian:
Google Groups
: a search
engine for newsgroups.
For example, to find out what experiences people have had with finding drivers for Promise controllers under Debian, try searching on the phrase Promise Linux driver. This will show you all the postings that contain these strings, i.e. those where people discussed these topics. If you add Debian to those search strings, you'll also get the postings specifically related to Debian.
AltaVista
or Google
, as long as you use the right
search terms.
For example, searching on the string "cgi-perl" gives a more detailed explanation of this package than the brief description field in its control file.
The Debian GNU/Linux distribution has a bug tracking system (BTS) which files details of bugs reported by users and developers. Each bug is given a number, and is kept on file until it is marked as having been dealt with.
Copies of this information are available at http://www.debian.org/Bugs/
.
A mail server provides access to the bug tracking system database via e-mail. In order to get the instructions, send an e-mail to request@bugs.debian.org with "help" in the body.
If you have found a bug in Debian, please read the instructions for reporting a bug in Debian. These instructions can be obtained in one of several ways:
http://www.debian.org/Bugs/Reporting
.
doc-debian
package installed. The
instructions are in the file /usr/doc/debian/bug-reporting.txt
.
You can use the packages bug
or reportbug
that will
guide you through the reporting process and mail the message to the proper
address, with some extra details about your system added automatically.
If you want to mail the report with an email program, send a message to
submit@bugs.debian.org
. The
message's first line must be similar to
Package: package-name
(replace package-name with the name of the package). The next line should relate the package version number in a similar way:
Version: version-number
The version number for any package installed on your system can be obtained using the command line
dpkg -s package-name
This section is referred to as the pseudo-header. The rest of the message should contain the description of the bug (please make it moderately detailed), the Debian release you are using, and versions of other relevant packages. The Debian release number will be displayed by the command
cat /etc/debian_version
Expect to get an automatic acknowledgement of your bug report. It will also be automatically given a bug tracking number, entered into the bug log and forwarded to the debian-bugs-dist mailing list.
If you identify a bug that is common to many programs, then rather than
entering dozens of very similar bug reports, you might prefer to send
individual bugs to maintonly@bugs.debian.org
(instead of the submit@... address) to reach only the respective package
maintainers, and then send a summary report to debian-devel and/or
debian-bugs-dist mailing lists.
Additionally, there exists a Debian package checker, called Lintian
, which is designed to
mechanically check Debian packages for policy violations and common packaging
errors. Thus, if you detect a bug in a package which is likely to appear in
other packages too, it might be better to get in contact with the Lintian
maintainers at lintian-maint@debian.org
so
that a new check is written for Lintian instead of reporting the bug directly.
This will most likely prevent the bug from appearing in future versions of the
package again, or in any other package of the distribution.
You can also use quiet@bugs.debian.org
, to submit
bug reports to the BTS only, without having them sent either to
debian-bugs-dist or to the maintainer. This `quiet' address is used very
rarely, e.g. when you want to send some minor data to your report, that should
just be recorded in the log, or when you want to record something in the BTS
log but you already sent it to the maintainer.
The Debian GNU/Linux FAQ
version 3.0.2, 28 January 2003