About This Guide

This manual will see you through your initial contact with openSUSE®. Check out the various parts of this manual to learn how to install, use and enjoy your system.

Installation and Basics

Guides you through the installation process and the basic configuration of your system. Introduces YaST, the central tool for installation and configuration of your system. Learn how to set up or modify key components of your system and how to connect to the internet.

Basics

This part mainly addresses to users changing to Linux from other operating systems. It introduces basic Linux concepts such as the user concept, the structure of the file system and access permissions for files and directories. An introduction to the shell is also provided, although you hardly ever need the command line to interact with your system nowadays.

Help and Troubleshooting

Provides an overview of where to find help and additional documentation in case you need more information or want to perform specific tasks with your system. Also find a compilation of the most frequent problems and annoyances and learn how to solve these problems on your own.

Many chapters in this manual contain links to additional documentation resources. This includes documentation that is available on the system as well as documentation available on the Internet.

For an overview of the documentation available for your product and the latest documentation updates, refer to http://doc.opensuse.org/ or to the following section.

1. Available Documentation

We provide HTML and PDF versions of our books in different languages. The following manuals for users and administrators are available on this product:

Start-Up

Guides you step-by-step through the installation of openSUSE from DVD, or from an ISO image, gives short introductions to the GNOME and KDE desktops including some key applications running on it. Also gives an overview of LibreOffice and its modules for writing texts, working with spreadsheets, or creating graphics and presentations.

Reference (↑Reference)

Gives you a general understanding of openSUSE and covers advanced system administration tasks. It is intended mainly for system administrators and home users with basic system administration knowledge. It provides detailed information about advanced deployment scenarios, administration of your system, the interaction of key system components and the set-up of various network and file services openSUSE offers.

Security Guide (↑Security Guide)

Introduces basic concepts of system security, covering both local and network security aspects. Shows how to make use of the product inherent security software like AppArmor (which lets you specify per program which files the program may read, write, and execute) or the auditing system that reliably collects information about any security-relevant events.

System Analysis and Tuning Guide (↑System Analysis and Tuning Guide)

An administrator's guide for problem detection, resolution and optimization. Find how to inspect and optimize your system by means of monitoring tools and how to efficiently manage resources. Also contains an overview of common problems and solutions and of additional help and documentation resources.

Virtualization with KVM (↑Virtualization with KVM)

This manual offers an introduction to setting up and managing virtualization with KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) on openSUSE. Also shows how to manage VM Guests with libvirt and QEMU.

Find HTML versions of most product manuals in your installed system under /usr/share/doc/manual or in the help centers of your desktop. Find the latest documentation updates at http://www.suse.com/documentation where you can download PDF or HTML versions of the manuals for your product.

2. Feedback

Several feedback channels are available:

Bugs and Enhancement Requests

To report bugs for a product component, or to submit enhancement requests, please use https://bugzilla.novell.com/. For documentation bugs, submit a bug report for the component Documentation of the respective product.

If you are new to Bugzilla, you might find the following articles helpful:

User Comments

We want to hear your comments about and suggestions for this manual and the other documentation included with this product. Use the User Comments feature at the bottom of each page in the online documentation or go to http://www.suse.com/documentation/feedback.html and enter your comments there.

Mail

For feedback on the documentation of this product, you can also send a mail to doc-team@suse.de. Make sure to include the document title, the product version and the publication date of the documentation. To report errors or suggest enhancements, provide a concise description of the problem and refer to the respective section number and page (or URL).

3. Documentation Conventions

The following typographical conventions are used in this manual:

  • /etc/passwd: directory names and filenames

  • placeholder: replace placeholder with the actual value

  • PATH: the environment variable PATH

  • ls, --help: commands, options, and parameters

  • user: users or groups

  • Alt, Alt+F1: a key to press or a key combination; keys are shown in uppercase as on a keyboard

  • File, File+Save As: menu items, buttons

  • Dancing Penguins (Chapter Penguins, ↑Another Manual): This is a reference to a chapter in another manual.

4. About the Making of This Manual

This book is written in Novdoc, a subset of DocBook (see http://www.docbook.org). The XML source files were validated by xmllint, processed by xsltproc, and converted into XSL-FO using a customized version of Norman Walsh's stylesheets. The final PDF is formatted through XEP from RenderX. The open source tools and the environment used to build this manual are available in the package daps that is shipped with openSUSE. The project's home page can be found at http://daps.sf.net/.

5. Source Code

The source code of openSUSE is publicly available. Refer to http://en.opensuse.org/Source_code for download links and more information.

6. Acknowledgments

With a lot of voluntary commitment, the developers of Linux cooperate on a global scale to promote the development of Linux. We thank them for their efforts—this distribution would not exist without them. Furthermore, we thank Frank Zappa and Pawar. Special thanks, of course, goes to Linus Torvalds.

Have a lot of fun!

Your SUSE Team


openSUSE Start-Up 12.3