How to ask a question on the Mailinglist

Before asking a technical question by e-mail, or in a newsgroup, or on a website chat board, do the following:

1. Try to find an answer by searching the archives of the forum you plan to post to.
2. Try to find an answer by searching the Web.
3. Try to find an answer by reading the manual.
4. Try to find an answer by reading a FAQ.
5. Try to find an answer by inspection or experimentation.
6. Try to find an answer by asking a skilled friend.
7. If you're a programmer, try to find an answer by reading the source code

Then, when you do ask a question:

Be precise and informative about your problem

* Describe the symptoms of your problem or bug carefully and clearly.
* Describe the environment in which it occurs (machine, OS, application, whatever). Provide your vendor's distribution and release level (e.g.: “Fedora Core 7”, “Slackware 9.1”, etc.).
* Describe the research you did to try and understand the problem before you asked the question.
* Describe the diagnostic steps you took to try and pin down the problem yourself before you asked the question.
* Describe any possibly relevant recent changes in your computer or software configuration.
* If at all possible, provide a way to reproduce the problem in a controlled environment.

This is based & copied from http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html which is a much longer version. The above tips are just a start.