How and where to get help for CentOS

There are some places on the web where you should look first when you are looking for help on CentOS.

1. The CentOS Wiki

Good, you already found the CentOS-Wiki. Feel free to browse around in here. This Wiki will be growing, so if you are coming back some time later, you might want to take a look at the changes list to see what has been added or modified since your last visit.

2. The Official CentOS Homepage

The CentOS homepage has very much information on many CentOS related aspects.

3. Manuals and other Documentation

The Documentation section is your starting point to the official CentOS documentation.

4. The Forums

The CentOS Forums give you a place to ask questions about CentOS. Many highly knowledgeable CentOS community members are helping other users. Please choose a topic that is appropriate for your question.

5. The Mailing Lists

The CentOS project runs several mailing lists on which you can ask your questions or help other people with the questions they have. All the CentOS developers as well as many long time Linux and CentOS users are on the lists.

There also is a japanese mailing list which does not run on lists.centos.org.

6. The CentOS developers' Blog aggregator

CentOS developers are interesting people, and their individual blogs are collected into a feed at Planet CentOS.

7. IRC

For help in real time, #centos on irc.freenode.net is another valuable source of information about CentOS issues. Please read the CentOS IRC Guidelines first.

8. Web Search

No, we're not running a CentOS version of Google. But Google (and other search engines) know very much about CentOS already, if you ask them correctly. And, when asking on the mailing list or in #centos, almost everybody expects that you searched for the problem you had on Google. Sure, you will get help. But you will get much smarter help, if you ask smart questions

• Tip - To find posts in the CentOS mailing list archives mentioning a particular topic, say "samba", enter the following Google search string:

  samba site:lists.centos.org 

  Likewise, to find posts in the CentOS Forums, enter the following:

  samba site:www.centos.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php 

And now go and have fun with CentOS.