Why They Say RTFM (Help in Debian)

Newbie in Debian mailing list is like a lamb waiting to be butchered. The one of the reason is because the new user is not search through the mailing list archive. But, there is one more significant reason why Debian folks have the most abusive act towards newbie.

The reason is: Debian have the most documentation ever about everything they have ever package.

Take a look at /usr/share/doc for example and documentation available.

Take a man command to figure the command.

Take a info command to (usually) more detailed version.

Now, how about automatic configuration?

For font configuration, Debian has Defoma for managing font.
For application configuration, Debian has dpkg-reconfigure to configure some package.
For some needs, Debian also packing small utilities to help people administer their computer. Search them in the repository, using Synaptic, apt-cache search, aptitude, or whatever package manager tool you fond of.

Debian also has Debian Policy, a standard for packaging. With that, every package would have same root installation path, configuration, and user for daemonize application. So, when you configure application, you could see the structure of the system is sanitized and well manage.

A system like Debian is complicated yet beautiful. It takes learning curve to get used to it.