Where can I find information located on my machine? Information is scattered all over the place. You can use the GNOME help browser (gnome-help-browser at the command line or select Programs Help system from the main GNOME menu) to browse most of these sources. A brief listing on a UNIX box would include the manual pages (man gnome), the info pages (info gnome), the documentation directory (usually /usr/doc/ but it may be /usr/share/doc/ on some systems) for packages, and the GNOME-specific documentation for the GNOME help browser. You can also use your package management tool as described earlier. The very first thing you need when trying to find resources on the net is a good search engine. Many of the archives mentioned below have search facilities. For general queries, an excellent search engine is Google. Please please: before posting questions to lists, make at least a cursory effort to check that they have not been asked recently! What about information on the net? All over the place. A representative listing would include at least this lot below. The obvious place to start is the GNOME website. Note that more detailed and technical information is at its sister site: developer.gnome.org. Gnotices is the website where much news is posted. There are a variety of mailing lists for different purposes. A reasonably complete mailing list page is at the main GNOME website. Some lists are hosted elsewhere. Before going onto the complete (well, as far as I can make it) list, a caveat. Many are high-traffic. All of them prefer you make an attempt to check the archives before posting a question. Some search sites for specific lists are listed following the mailing lists themselves. Eazel host several lists of which the Nautilus list is a particularly useful one to know about. Ximian also host several lists of which the Evolution list (for Evolution users) and the support (for people using the Ximian GNOME distribution) are probably the most useful ones to know about. The gnome-list mailing list in particular gets a lot of traffic, because people often aren't sure where to ask questions or simply don't know where to ask. It's really not the best place for X-related problems, distribution-related problems, questions on how to mount a filesystem, perform backups, or what people's favourite mailers are. For non-GNOME or GNOME-and-particular distribution questions, there are other mailing lists. Here's a partial list of where to look: Red Hat users can head for the redhat-list found at the Red Hat mailing lists page on the Red Hat website. Debian users can head for several Debian mailing lists on the Debian website. Mandrake users can head for several Mandrake mailing lists on the Mandrake website. Caldera users can head for several Caldera mailing lists on the Caldera website. Slackware doesn't have a specific "general questions" mailing list listed in its mailing lists but there is apparently an active newsgroup which handles a lot of newbie questions: alt.os.linux.slackware. FreeBSD users can head for several FreeBSD mailing lists at the FreeBSD website. The best place for newbie questions is the freebsd-questions list. (Thanks to Andrew Mobbs for this.) There are several new (as of June 2000) XFree86 lists at the XFree86 website. The newbie list is described as being for general XFree86 setup and configuration problems. Further contributions welcomed. Search engines for particular lists: The Google search engine appears to have indexed at least half of the GNOME website. Geocrawler has a searchable archive of many GNOME-related mailing lists. It does not handle attachments very well, though. Somelist has an archive of lots of GNOME lists which handles attachments. Owen Taylor created a site for searching the mail.gnome.org archives. Very handy. If you are looking for advice on a particular bug, it is well worth trying the various bug-trackers. Many people will include patches if they can. The most-used bug-trackers for GNOME are listed here. It is often useful to try lots of them: people put Helix bugs into Red Hat's tracker and Red Hat bugs into the main GNOME tracker and so on very commonly. The Wonderful GNOME Bugtracker is comprehensive, to put it mildly. As of March 2001 it is also dead. Oops. Gnome is now moving to a bugzilla-based bug-tracker. The Ximian bugtracker is for Ximian problems. Red Hat's Bugzilla is not just for GNOME, but you can search under particular packages for GNOME problems and fixes. Eazel's Bugzilla may help if you are using Nautilus in particular. The Users Guide can be a source of useful information: you can always find the latest version in your local mirror of ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/stable/sources/users-guide/. It is available to browse online at http://www.labs.redhat.com/gug/users-guide/. People who want to dig deeper may want to look at the CVS browser which lets you see who's done what recently and what's currently in there. This is where all the central code for GNOME lives. Some applications are covered in more detail on other websites: the Ximian, Eazel and RHAD Labs Rumor Mill sites often have information; and many GNOME applications have homepages at the SourceForge site: just search for the word gnome in the box.