Man pages are a great place to start when you need help using a program, however they don’t always get the point across in an easy to follow manner. This is especially true if you’re new to Linux. Most of the packages that you install will come with a man page (or several) as well as additional documentation. Both Fedora and Ubuntu tuck all of this additional information away in sub-directories off of the /usr/share/doc/ directory. There you can find such gems as FAQs, examples of configuration files, changelogs and more (depending on what the package offers). I should note here that I’ve found considerably less extra documentation in Fedora than I’ve found in Ubuntu.
Open up your file manager (for many of you it will be Konqueror or Nautilus) and browse to /usr/share/doc/, there you will find hundreds of folders named after the packages installed on your system. Find an application you’re familiar with and enter the folder. You can now view all of the extra documentation associated with that application.
Note: Depending on your distribution, many of these files might be kept in .gz (compressed) files. Double-click on the file to open it in your default archive manager, this will display the actual text file contained there-in. You can now double-click on the text file to read it’s contents.
January 4th, 2007 at 8:18 am
[...] In my last post I explained that the /usr/share/doc/ directory contains a LOT of information about the packages installed on your system. I noted that some of the documentation will be stored in .gz files and how to view them. It’s easy if you’re browsing with a graphical file manager, but what if you need to view the documents from the command line? [...]