Help:Reading

This page is supposed to guide you in using ThinkWiki. It offers you strategies on how to find information here in case you need help about a specific topic or just want to know something about your ThinkPad or ThinkPads in general.

Generic starting points

There are five generic starting points that can help you whatever your mission might be:

• You can start browsing on the ThinkWiki start page. We will try to keep all ThinkWiki pages accessable in a logical structure that branches out from there.
• You can always use the Search field on the left, enter some word designating what you are looking for, press the search button and hope that one of the search results will be helpful.
• From our ThinkPad models overview you can pick your particular model page to get a list with all articles concerning that model.
• And on the distributions page you can choose your distribution and find all pages containing information related to that distro.
• You can try browsing the Categories.

Finding help for a specific problem

ThinkWiki most likely doesn't provide a single page covering exactly your problem. It rather offers you generic starting points where you can start your hunt for information that may give you clues to a solution. The most typical starting points for your solution hunt are:

• The Known Problems page list pages covering specific problems people have run into with partial or complete solutions to them.
• If you look for information on how to install a specific distro on a specific model, look at the Installation page.
• In case you have problems installing or configuring a special driver, look at the Driver installation HOWTO listing.
• In case you need help or information about the preloaded system, backing it up or recovering it, look at the Preload Recovery page.
• If you run into Power Management related problems, the Power Management HOWTO should help.

There are several more HOWTO pages accessible from the ThinkWiki main page

Finding information about a specific model

There are two places to start for that:

• The ThinkPad models overview page. It contains a list of all models known to the editors of ThinkWiki, each of them containing general information about that model as well as a list of all articles with information related to it. I.e. if you want to know about the ThinkPad X22, just click on the X22 page and you'll find all we know about it.
• The second place to look at is the Hardware Specifications page. Here you will find a list of model and type numbers, ordered by model. Just click on a type number and you'll find detailed specifications of exactly that type. In case your exact model-type number isn't there, look at one of the IBM provided PDF documents linked from that page.

Finding information about ThinkPads in general

If you are planning to buy a notebook and want to start with an overall impression of ThinkPads, try the following pages:

• The ThinkPad History gives a historic overview about the appearance of ThinkPads in chronological order, accompanied with some information about their specialties and features.
• The Thinkpad Technologies page lists several of the technologies found in various ThinkPads. Each single Technology page in turn holds a list of ThinkPads this featuring this technology.
• Look at the Components or Components Category pages to find out about hardware used in ThinkPad computers.

Finding information about your specific distribution

As said above, the distributions page holds a list of distributions you can find information about on ThinkWiki. Each of the single distribution pages listed there in turn contain a list of all articles with relevant information for that distribution.

If you don't find what you are looking for

Well, go figure - and let us know your findings here. ;-) Ok, more seriously, the Links, Mailinglists and IRC pages list other sources of useful information. Also pay attention to the "External Sources" and "Related Links" sections found on almost every page. They usually contain a list of useful links to pages outside ThinkWiki. And of course, Google is always your friend.

Good luck.