This guide is licensed under the terms of the FDL (Free Documentation License) as published by the Free Software Foundation. Debian Documentation The Documentation System (doc-base)

Debian has a centralized system for documentation. The developer of a package must "register" its documentation on this system making it available to the system.

dhelp is one of the programs that are able to take the user directly to the documentation using the browser especified by the user as the default.

Before using it, you need to install the dhelp package. See for more information. Install the doc-base package too, wich is needed for the documents to be registered.

To start it, just type: $ dhelp dhelp looks for the environment variable $BROWSER. If it doesn't find it, it uses the browser it finds first. For example, to tell it that galeon should be the browser used, you insert: $ export BROWSER=galeon in the /home/user/.bash_profile and/or /home/usuário/.bashrc files.

This way, as soon as you call dhelp, it will start galeon to browse Debian's documentation. Debian Documentation via www

dwww creates a www environment for all available documentation on your system. You may even read manpages using a browser, what makes reading manpages a lot better.

To use it, install the dwww package and, also the doc-base to have the html documentation indexed.

There are two ways of using dwww: as an index, in wich you browse to find what you want, or as a fast query to all the documentation provided by a package. To see the index, just run: $ dwww To see all the available documentation for a package, type: $ dwww package

There are other kinds of programs to access doc-base indexed documentation, doc-central for example, that also uses an http server.