Documentation Resources

If you have the Official Red Hat Linux boxed set, remember to take a look through the Red Hat Linux 7.2 Documentation CD. All of our manuals are on this CD, as well as other useful resources. Inserting the Documentation CD in the CD-ROM drive should automatically open the file manager (Obviously, you will need to be logged in to do this. See Chapter 1 for information on how to log in). If the file manager does not open automatically after a minute or so, right-click on the CD-ROM icon on your desktop and select Mount Device or Mount, whichever appears on the pop-up menu.

When the file manager opens, click on RH-DOCS in the left window. On the right, you will see several files. There are three ways to view the manuals:

View in PDF format.

You will see one file whose name starts with the letters "pdf". Click on this to view the manuals in PDF format.

Install the manuals on your computer.

Files beginning with the letters "rhl" can be installed on your system. To do this, select the /cdrom/RedHat directory in the left window of the file manager. Expand the folder (click on the + sign) and then click on RPMS beneath it. You will see a variety of documentation files on the right.

Scroll through the right side of the file manager screen and look for files beginning with the letters "rhl" (as shown in Figure 4. There will be one file for each of our four manuals. The file names contain the abbreviations IG, RG, CG, and GSG, corresponding to the Installation, Reference, Customization, and Getting Started guides respectively.

Now, open a terminal by clicking on the Terminal Emulation Program button on the panel at the bottom of your desktop. Type the following at the command line:

cd su

Now press [Enter]. You will be asked for your root password. Enter the password at the command line and press [Enter]. You are now logged in as root. To install all four manuals, type the following:

rpm -ivh rhl-*.rpm

Press [Enter].

If you only want to install certain manuals, replace "rhl-*.rpm" with the full file name (as shown in the right window of the file manager) of the manual that you want to install. For example, the file name for the Official Red Hat Linux Getting Started Guide will look something like rhl-gsg-en-7.2-5.noarch.rpm, so you would type the following to install the Official Red Hat Linux Getting Started Guide on your computer:

rpm -ivh rhl-gsg-en-7.2-5.noarch.rpm

Press [Enter]. Type exit at the command line and press [Enter]. This takes you out of the root login and back to your user account.

Now go to Main Menu =>Programs => Documentation => Official Red Hat Linux and select the manual you want to open. It will automatically open in a Web browser.

View manuals online (HTML).

Look under RH-DOCS in the file manager tree. The file that ends with the letters "html" opens the manuals for viewing in a Web browser without installing them on your system. Double-click on the .html file in the file manager and you will see a screen with links to all of the manuals. At the bottom of this page, there is a link to the opening page of the documentation CD. The opening page has links to a variety of Linux documentation resources.

Of course, you can also go to http://www.redhat.com/support/manuals and bookmark the site. All of the manuals are available there in PDF and HTML format.