Help and Documentation

Contents

35.1. Documentation Directory
35.2. Man Pages
35.3. Info Pages

Abstract

openSUSE® comes with various sources of information and documentation, many of which are already integrated into your installed system:

Documentation in /usr/share/doc: This traditional help directory holds various documentation files and release notes for your system. Find more detailed information in Section 35.1, “Documentation Directory”.
Man Pages and Info Pages for Shell Commands: When working with the shell, you do not need to know the options of the commands by heart. Traditionally, the shell provides integrated help by means of man pages and info pages. Read more in Section 35.2, “Man Pages” and Section 35.3, “Info Pages”.
Desktop Help Centers: The help centers of both the KDE desktop (KDE help center) and the GNOME desktop (Yelp) provide central access to the most important documentation resources on your system in searchable form. These resources include online help for installed applications, man pages, info pages, and the Novell/SUSE manuals delivered with your product.
Separate Help Packages for Some Applications: When installing new software with YaST, the software documentation is installed automatically (in most cases) and usually appears in the help center of your desktop. However, some applications, such as GIMP, may have different online help packages that can be installed separately with YaST and do not integrate into the help centers.

Documentation Directory

The traditional directory to find documentation on your installed Linux system is /usr/share/doc. Usually, the directory contains information about the packages installed on your system, plus release notes, manuals, and more.

	Contents Depends on Installed Packages
In the Linux world, many manuals and other kinds of documentation are available in the form of packages, just like software. How much and which information you find in `/usr/share/docs` also depends on the (documentation) packages installed. If you cannot find the subdirectories mentioned here, check if the respective packages are installed on your system and add them with YaST, if needed.

Novell/SUSE Manuals

We provide HTML and PDF versions of our books in different languages. In the manual subdirectory, find HTML versions of most of the Novell/SUSE manuals available for your product. For an overview of all documentation available for your product refer to the preface of the manuals.

If more than one language is installed, /usr/share/doc/manual may contain different language versions of the manuals. The HTML versions of the Novell/SUSE manuals are also available in the help center of both desktops. For information on where to find the PDF and HTML versions of the books on your installation media, refer to the openSUSE Release Notes. They are available on your installed system under /usr/share/doc/release-notes/ or online at your product-specific Web page at http://www.novell.com/documentation/.

HOWTOs

If the howto package is installed on your system, /usr/share/doc also holds the howto subdirectory, where you find additional documentation for many tasks relating to the setup and operation of Linux software.

Package Documentation

Under packages, find the documentation that is included in the software packages installed on your system. For every package, a subdirectory /usr/share/doc/packages/packagename is created. It often contains README files for the package and sometimes examples, configuration files, or additional scripts. The following list introduces typical files to be found under /usr/share/doc/packages. None of these entries are mandatory and many packages might just include a few of them.

AUTHORS: List of the main developers.
BUGS: Known bugs or malfunctions. Might also contain a link to a Bugzilla Web page where you can search all bugs.
CHANGES , ChangeLog: Summary of changes from version to version. Usually interesting for developers, because it is very detailed.
COPYING , LICENSE: Licensing information.
FAQ: Question and answers collected from mailing lists or newsgroups.
INSTALL: How to install this package on your system. As the package is already installed by the time you get to read this file, you can safely ignore the contents of this file.
README, README.*: General information on the software. For example, for what purpose and how to use it.
TODO: Things that are not implemented yet, but probably will be in the future.
MANIFEST: List of files with a brief summary.
NEWS: Description of what is new in this version.