Getting Answers to Your Linux Questions
Important general-purpose resource: The Linux Documentation Project, http://www.tldp.org/
See esp. the HOWTOs, Network Admin Guide, System Admin Guide, Installation and Getting Started.
Which distribution? -- Horribly debatable question, addressed in
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/CD-Distributions-EN-HOWTO/index.html.
Best to try a few and decide for yourself.
Hardware compatibility lists:
http://hardware.redhat.com/hcl/genpage2.cgi
http://www.debian.org/releases/woody/i386/install
http://cdb.suse.de/index.php?LANG=en_US
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Hardware-HOWTO.html
Modems: http://www.idir.net/~gromitkc/winmodem.html
Printing: http://www.linuxprinting.org/
HP OfficeJet: http://hpoj.sourceforge.net/
X Window System software & config: http://www.xfree86.org/
Proprietary servers: http://www.xig.com/ http://www.metrolink.com/
Laptop issues: http://www.linux-laptop.net/
Sound cards: http://www.alsa-project.org http://www.opensound.com/
Parallel-port devices: http://www.torque.net/parport/ (Zip, CDR, QuickCam, Iomega Ditto, etc.)
USB: http://www.linux-usb.org/
Firewire: http://www.linux1394.org/
Digital cameras (see also USB, Firewire, etc.): http://www.teaser.fr/~hfiguiere/linux/digicam.html
Ethernet
cards: http://www.scyld.com/network/
ATM network cards: http://linux-atm.sourceforge.net/
PCMCIA: http://pcmcia-cs.sourceforge.net/
Scanners: http://www.mostang.com/sane/
CD writers: http://wt.xpilot.org/cgi-bin/winni/lsc-orig.pl
DVD: http://www.linuxvideo.org/ http://www.nongnu.org/dvdrtools/
Joysticks: http://www.linuxgames.com/joystick/
ISDN adapters: http://www.muc.de/~hm/linux/linux-isdn.html
Wireless LAN 802.11b: http://www.goonda.org/wireless/ http://nocat.net/
http:http://www.live.com/wireless/unix-base-station.html
http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Jean_Tourrilhes/Linux/
Applications: http://freshmeat.net/ http://www.linuxapps.com/
http://www.linuxlinks.com/Software/ http://www.linux.org/apps/
Which X window manager: http://www.plig.org/xwinman/
Which desktop: http://www.gnome.org http://www.kde.org/
News: http://slashdot.org/ http://lwn.net/ http://linuxgazette.com/
For tough problems try the newsgroup archives! Go to http://www.google.com/, select Groups, then Advanced Groups Search. Search in newsgroup “comp.os.linux.*”. For hardware issues search in “comp.os.linux.hardware”.
Prepared 2002-11-12 by Rod Roark (http://www.sunsetsystems.com/)
Thanks to Rick Moen for much of this information