How do I read various manuals, guides and howtos, which are usually in the form of deb packages with names ending in -doc and installed in /usr/share/doc directory?
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4 Answers
First you need to install doc-base package, which registers all documentation that is not man pages or info files. Then you use one of the following packages - dwww, dhelp, doc-central, yelp, or khelpcenter4 - to view it.
Source: Debian FAQ: What other documentation exists on and for a Debian system?
answered Jun 10, 2012 at 20:19
Mirzhan Irkegulov
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Tried all those:
dwwwworked great instantly (but is browser based; I like CLI but that's another thing),dhelpdidn't work (for example, not hit for "xclip"), "doc-central" didn't work (doesn't seem to be a tool - no command installed, just a folder with a homepage that displays two frames, one of which is dysfunctional),yelpworked (GUI),khelpcenter4didn't work with no trace whatsoever afteraptitude install. Althoughdwwwseems great, I'd like a CLI browser or emacs mode for this. As forlinks,lynx(@CarlosCampderrós below): a lot of those files are not in HTML.Emanuel Berg– Emanuel Berg2012-08-02 17:54:12 +00:00Commented Aug 2, 2012 at 17:54
To see doc in html form (of the packages that provide it), you can install apache2 on debian, and by default has an alias to /usr/share/doc, accessible only from localhost. So, install apache2 and then go to http://localhost/doc/.
Or you can use a text-based browser like w3m or links directly on the command line: w3m /usr/share/doc/lintian/lintian.html/index.html
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The access control on Debian to .../dwww is done by /etc/apache2/conf-enabled/dwww.confDave X– Dave X2017-07-20 18:58:52 +00:00Commented Jul 20, 2017 at 18:58
There is LOTS of documentation already on your GNU/Linux system, although except for man pages, some of it is fairly unfriendly.
I went looking for a browser for this stuff and am excited to finally have this documentation more easily at hand.
Here are notes from two document browsers I've tried out:
Both dwww and doc-central run as a web page. I didn't try out dhelp as it doesn't appear to be in my repository.
dwww seems to be much more advanced than doc-central, which now appears quite old.
man -k dwww shows you that it's actually quite complex, even including a cache, and cron jobs.
You may need to reconfigure your web server a bit as I had to to get these to work.
Also if you do try it out doc-central, the man page is at man doccentral, not doc-central, which is kind of annoying.
Here are some screen shots:
debian-handbook , debian-reference , harden-doc, debian-faq and other packages on: Debian Users' Manuals, can be installed for offline use.
sudo apt install debian-handbook debian-reference harden-doc debian-faq
