Methodology or Philosophy of Troubleshooting

Hi,

I am trying to develop a bag of tricks here. Because now I must admit that
when I get anything other than a networking problem (I am not a coder), I am
frozen; a deer in the headlights. So I would like to ask whether anyone has
some general thoughts on how to tackle a Linux problem; whether anyone has
some heurisms or general methodolgies or truths that they would like to
share. So perhaps I could explain the problem, and someone could explain
the thought process of how to solve it?

I loaded RH 7.1 on my laptop (again). Linuxconf was somehow not installed,
so I installed it via rpm ("rpm -ih linuxfonf-1.24r2-10.i386.rpm"). But rpm
would not install it because it failed a dependency: it first wanted "gd."
So I installed gd-2.0.1-1.i386.rpm. Then I typed "linuxconf" and the
following error message was displayed: ""linuxconf: error while loading
shared libraries: libgd.so.1.8: cannot load shared object file: No such file
or directory".

Not knowing what the hell that meant, I loaded libgd-1.3-4.i386.rpm which
seemingly had not been loaded during the original install. Still, however,
I receive the same error message when I type "linuxconf."

So I thought maybe I should look at the source code (is that how problems
like this are solved)??? But I am not sure which file to look at. I don't
even know how to look at linuxconf , as I don't know where it is ("find
/ -name linuxconf*" did not turn it up).

So could someone tell me how to tackle this. What is the
methodology???????????????????????????????/

Thank you,

Eric