how ro find help files for Linux software
 

Hi All,

I have been working with Ubuntu for a couple of weeks, and enjoying it.

My problem seems to be with help files for software I have installed. Apparently these do not get installed with the program? I have installed Gnucash, but when I go to the help, nothing opens. Seems like a different program had a link to their website for help files.

I did a Google/Linux search, but did not come up with anything relevant for gnucash. Should I expect different programs to have different ways of dealing with help files? Is there something I am missing, some way I can get the help files installed with the program?

Thanks for the help.

I am really beginning to like Ubuntu V7.04.

Sorry,

I did find a web page with Gnucash help.

My other questions still remain. Is this the typical way to look up help for a program?

Thanks

For quite a few applications, you can download documentation from the repositories (the -doc files); these get downloaded to /usr/share/docs by default. Other ones have a help item but the kind of information that it offers varies widely: some have only a few lines while other ones have complete phonebooks to wade through. You can also use the "man" command in a terminal. For example, if you have gnucash installed, you should be able to do

man gnucash

Man pages tend to be pretty terse and limited to command line arguments but they usually also have a section pointing you to a place that offers more information. For example, I just ran

man kmymoney2

on my system; the output lists a few pages of relevant commands and the final section points me to khelpcenter:help on my system to get more detailed information.