Chris Tyler - Fedora Linux

Most open source software packages include a small number of text files written by the programmers, which include licensing information, change histories, errata and bug lists, and release notes. In Fedora these miscellaneous documents are placed in /usr/share/doc and are organized in directories by package name and version. For example, the notes for dia (a diagram-drawing application) are available in /usr/share/doc/dia-0.95 .

I find that the easiest way to view these documents is to use a web browser, which enables you to navigate among directories and view documents by simply clicking on them. To do this, just open the Firefox web browser and enter /usr/share/doc as the location.

To view these files from the shell prompt, change to the directory you wish to view, and then use ls to list names of the files and less to view the contents of any text files that interest you. For example, here are the steps you might take to view the dia text files:

$ cd /usr/share/doc

$ ls -d dia*

dia-0.95 dialog-1.0.20050306

$ cd dia-0.95

$ ls -l

total 724

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1578 Aug 16 2004 AUTHORS

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 574015 Aug 17 2004 ChangeLog

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 17992 Mar 12 2004 COPYING

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 11364 Aug 16 2004 custom-shapes

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1620 Aug 16 2004 diagram.dtd

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3927 Aug 16 2004 INSTALL

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4955 Aug 16 2004 KNOWN_BUGS

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 21535 Aug 17 2004 NEWS

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3444 Aug 16 2004 README

drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Sep 27 01:13 samples

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2324 Aug 16 2004 shape.dtd

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 501 Aug 16 2004 sheet.dtd

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1379 Aug 19 2004 THANKS

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2545 Aug 16 2004 TODO

$ less KNOWN_BUGS

The less command will enable you to scroll through the specified file ( KNOWN_BUGS ) in the same way that you would move through a manpage, using the arrow keys and Page Up/Page Down keys to scroll and q to quit.

Note that this directory also contains a sample directory, which includes some sample files for use with the dia program.

The man command's -t option will format a page into PostScript; you can then send the PostScript output to your printer with the command lpr using a pipe. This command prints the manpage for ls :

$ man -t ls | lpr

It's easy to convert manpages into PDF or HTML formats.

For PDF, use the -t option with man and then pipe the PostScript output into the ps2pdf program. This command places the manpage for ls into the file ls_man_page.pdf :

$ man -t ls | ps2pdf - ls_man_page.pdf

The commands to convert a manpage to HTML are more complex:

$ zcat $(man --path ls ) | man2html | tail +3 > ls_man_page.html

This uses man --path to find the compressed, unformatted manual page; zcat to decompress the page; man2html to convert the page to HTML; and tail to strip off the unneeded httpd Content-type header.

Other sources of information about Fedora and Linux:

 The Fedora Project at RedHat: http://fedora.redhat.com/

 The Fedora Project Wiki: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/

 The Fedora Forums: http://www.fedoraforum.org/

 Links to Linux-related news at LinuxToday: http://linuxtoday.com/

 O'Reilly Network: http://www.oreillynet.com/

A large part of system administration involves dealing with files and directories: creating directories, copying files, moving files and directories around, and deleting them. Fedora provides a powerful set of tools for managing files from the shell prompt as well as graphically.

Linux, like most modern operating systems, uses a tree-like hierarchy to store and organize files. To manage files effectively, extend the hierarchy to organize your data.

Fedora's master directory (or folder , as it would be referred to by other operating systems) is called the root directory ; it may contain files and directories. Each of those directories may in turn contain other files and directories.

For each user, one directory is designated as the home directory , and that is where that user stores her personal files. Additionally, each process (a running copy of a program) has a current working directory on the system, which is the directory that it accesses by default unless another directory is explicitly specified.

The root directory is always the same system-wide; the home directory is consistent for a particular user, but varies from user to user; and the current working directory is unique to each process and can be changed anytime.

A pathname specifies how to find a file in the file hierarchy. There are three different pathname schemes that can be used, based on the three different starting points (root, home, and current working directory); each scheme specifies the path from the selected starting point to the desired file, separating directory names with the forward slash character ( / ). These three schemes are summarized in Table 4-4 .

Table 4-4. Absolute, Relative, and Relative-to-Home pathnames

The special symbols . (same directory) and .. (parent directory) are useful in pathnames. For example, if your current directory is /home/chris/book , then ../invitation refers to /home/chris/invitation .

Fedora uses a standard set of directories derived from historical conventions, the Linux Standard Base (LSB) project, and the kernel. Table 4-5 outlines the key directories and their purpose.

Table 4-5. Key directories in Fedora Core

Local files refers to filesbinaries, scripts, and datafilesthat you have developed and that are not part of Fedora. Separating these files from the rest of the operating system makes it easier to move them to a new system in the future.