Re: What documentation and what order

[Snowfox <snowfox@snowfox.net>]

David -

You're asking a million questions at once. Your best answer is to dig
in and start doing things.

Your best place to start would be in /usr/share/doc where you'll find
the Debian-specific documentation, as well as documentation for most
of your isntalled software.

The reason much of the documentation is compressed is that it can be
viewed that way, and they take up far less space. Use 'zgrep' to
search through files and 'zless' or 'zmore' to view them.

Look at the man pages for apt-get and dpkg for more information on how
to find where files are placed, and to better understand the packaging
system.

Presumably the reason for the kernel not being unpacked straight away
is that it's huge, and uses non-standard compression. (bzip2) Further,
people often fetch kernel source to build for other machines; without
knowing more about your intent, it would be difficult to prevent
something getting replaced which shouldn't have been.

Take it one step at a time. Spend some time on a problem before asking
for help and you'll find that you get really good at finding answers
yourself. Debian is put together very consistently, and it'll all be
second nature before you know it.


   From: "David A. Rogers" <darogers@xnet.com>

   I've used Unix and other Linuxes for some time now, but I am just starting to
   use Debian.  What documents should I read and in which order to get up do
   speed on how Debian does things?  Would it be better to read a book?  If so,
   which one?

   I particular, I am interested in:
   - Setting up X.
   - Setting up mail (end user not server) i.e. I have an ISP that stores my mail
     and forwards it.
   - Recompiling the kernel
   - Setting up sound (either OSS or ALSA)
   - Debian tips and tricks - I found out about alternatives on this list.  Cool
     idea.
   - Debian uses a lot of indirection.  Ex. The contents of /etc/modules/ALSA
     gets plunked into modules.conf after update-modules is run.  Where is stuff
     like this documented?

   Some things I've run into already.

   Both the alsa source and kernel source were installed as packed files.  Why
   didn't apt-get unpack them for me?

   I finally figured out where the were.  How was I supposed to know where
   apt-get put them?

   Under Mandrake, the standard module drivers for the Crystal sound cards have a
   really annoying click every time a sound is played.  Is this true for Debian?

   I've been trying to get ALSA set up.  From searching the web, it looked like
   pervious kernels had matching alsa-modules-(kernel version number) packages.
   alsa-cache search doesn't find one for 2.2.17 (potato).  It looks like I've
   got to build them.  Why the change?