Pastebin

When you have information that you want people in IRC to be able to read, the common way to display it is to put in in the foresight pastebin. This page allows you to post any text with a title and then link that information to the irc channel. Here is a rundown:

1. First copy the text that you need to show to an irc member. Many common files are outlined below
2. Then head to http://foresightlinux.org/paste
3. Fill in a title (if you want) and then paste the text into the text field.
4. Then pick a syntax if this file is a program file (normally in our cases it's not)
5. Last fill out your name or email (again, only if you want) and click ok
6. Finally copy the address in the address bar of your browser and paste it into IRC. It's helpful if you add the name of the person originally helping you to the beginning of your message. (For example, if kelsin is helping you you can write "kelsin: http://etc". In most IRC clients this will help the user see that someone is talking to him.

Files

Accessing files

Once you know what file you need you can get to it and copy the text out in many ways.

GEdit

Since Gnome is Foresight's main feature, a common text editor is GEdit. To open a file in gedit go to Applications -> Accessories -> Text Editor. Once in the program you can goto File -> Open... then broswe to the file using gnome's file browser.

To go directory to the file a bit quicker you can open up a terminal (Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal) and then type gedit <path>. For example, if you want to open /etc/X11/xorg.conf you type this:

gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Either way, one you get gedit open you can copy all of the text by hitting Ctrl-A to select all (or goto Edit -> Select All) or just mouse over it all, hit Ctrl-C to copy, then goto your browser and Ctrl-v to paste into pastebin.

Firefox

You can also see a file just in your browser. For example, in firefox if you want to view /etc/X11/xorg.conf you can goto file:///etc/X11/xorg.conf and it will appear in your browser and you can copy and paste from that.

Common Files

xorg.conf

This file contains setup information for your X server. X server is what linux uses to display windows and graphics. This is the file that contains resolution, video card, monitor, and screen settings. We will ask to see it to help debug issues dealing with video cards, resolution problems etc. It is located at /etc/X11/xorg.conf

fstab

This file contains information about what file systems to mount up on boot up.

As a quick rundown, linux doesn't name drives like windows does (with C: D: etc). Different drives are "mounted" into the root filesystem at different places. This file lists all of the real devices (such as /dev/hda, dev/sdb) and where they are mounted (/, /home, /var, /mnt/windows, etc). It is located at /etc/fstab

Commands

Getting the text pasted

Sometimes we don't need the output of files, we need the output of commands that you run (either as root or your user). This will almost always start with opening up a terminal. To do this goto Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal. Once there you can run the command by typing it. After that you can copy from the terminal by Ctrl-C and paste into your browser with Ctrl-V.

If the command produces a lot of output you can save it's output to a file first. If the command you need to run is ifconfig you can do:

ifconfig > ~/temp
gedit ~/temp

In order to first save the output of ifconfig to the file temp in your home directory and then open it with gedit to copy and paste into pastebin.

Common Commands

ifconfig

This command lists your current settings for any network interfaces. Common ones like your ethernet and wireless cards are listed as eth#, but other names exist also. This helps us by showing IP address and other settings.

conary config

Conary is foresight's package management. If you're having trouble installing files we might want to see the output of this command which just lists all of your settings that conary uses when it operates.