So, you’ve made the move to free software. As you’ve no doubt noticed, there are quite a few differences between the proprietary software you’ve been used to and free software: the interfaces are different; it costs a heck of a lot less; and if you’re using one of the community supported distributions there’s no premium rate helpline! These all seem like benefits to me, but what happens when you have a problem?

There are a huge number of sources you can turn to: in this article we’ll cover where to find the most common ones and how to make the most of them. I’ll be presenting them in a hierarchy, so, when you have a problem, start at the beginning and work through to the end. This will help you to understand the problem yourself and ensure you have plenty of information about it before talking to a real person (if it comes to that), making people far more receptive and willing to help.

Your distribution’s documentation

Let’s start with a massively underused resource: the documentation that ships with the system. Free software rarely comes with a printed manual but it does come with a wealth of material included in various digital forms. If it’s a graphical application you’re having trouble with look for a Help menu; OpenOffice.org has a brilliant example of built-in help and has documentation about a huge range of features, many of which you probably never realised existed.

If it’s a command line program you need help with, `man` and `info` are two very valuable sources of information

If it’s a command line program you need help with, man and info are two very valuable sources of information. Simply typing, at a command line, man followed by the program name and then Enter will provide you with extensive instructions on how to use a program, different options, their functions, and references to other manual pages that might be of use; run the command man man for more details. Some programs don’t use man for their documentation needs, but use info instead. Run the command info for more information. Another interesting, and sometimes unexpected source of information, comes when you’re trying to tweak a configuration file: more often than not, configuration files will be heavily commented, explaining all of the options available to you.

The final source of help that you’ll find is commonly shipped with distributions is that which is accessible from the menus on the desktop. In GNOME, it can be found under the System menu, and in KDE under the K menu.

Our focus now turns to the online world. A great place to start is your distribution’s home page (or the home page of the application you’re working with), which will often have links to community created documentation, covering a much wider range of topics than is available from the desktop. There will often be links to forums here too, but I would recommend holding off on the forums for the time being. Results turned up from Google (covered below) will often include the forums, and it’s worth doing a bit more research yourself to ensure you have enough information to give on a forum before asking yourself.

I’ve compiled a short list of, in my opinion, some of the best online documentation provided by the distributions. Take a look around at all of them; although each distribution is different, many of them share common features and what’s not documented in one might be in another.

• Ubuntu’s Official Documentation
• Ubuntu’s Community Contributed Documentation
• Fedora’s Official Documentation—also be sure to check the drafts for useful, but rough, information
• openSUSE Documentation
• The Gentoo Wiki

Google!

I’m sure you’re not surprised to find Google so high in the list, but let me put forward a few of its best features: firstly, when you first encounter a problem it’s quite likely you will only have a vague idea of what is causing it, and Google can quickly help you to narrow down the likely causes. Secondly, it provides a great overview of different sites where answers might be available, helping you to better target the next stage of your investigation.

The Google Linux search logo, so you know you’re in the right place

I’m being specific about using Google because of their Special Searches, and more accurately, their GNU/Linux search feature (you can find it at http://www.google.com/linux/). The benefits of this are immediately obvious: Google indexes a huge amount of information from the web, and quite often your search for information about free software returns results about Windows, and sometimes even about windows! Using this special search feature will narrow the scope of results significantly and make it easier to find exactly what you need.

Using the special Google Linux search feature will narrow the scope of results significantly and make it easier to find exactly what you need

This is just the beginning of learning how to use Google effectively, however, and the internet is littered with cheat sheets that all promise to take your Googling to the next level. In my opinion the most useful is Google’s own cheat sheet which is clean and simple to use, but lacks descriptions of all the different operators available; for a more complete list see here.

Before moving on, I’ll give you an example of how to use Google. A common problem people have is stuttering DVD playback, so I’ll see if I can solve this problem for someone using Ubuntu. An obvious starting place would be to enter “Stuttering DVD playback” into Google, unfortunately none of the results on the first page are particularly helpful because our search was too broad. You can improve this result in two very simple ways: switch to Google’s Linux search or use some operators in your search. A refined search with operators might look like “Stuttering DVD playback -windows +ubuntu”. The first result actually has enough information in it to solve the problem. The same is true if you use Google’s Linux search, although, in my opinion, it’s an even better result!