A thing we should all do more often before asking a question on a computer-related IRC channel or mailing list.
From my experience, human assistance is no match to the amount of technical information, especially regarding Open Source software, which can be found on Google (and the lately added Google Deja).
Often you can simply search for the "error message" (surrounded by quotes) or briefly describe your problem to find an answer. Many people have probably came across that same problem before, dared to ask it in a mailing list and had received responses, which were archived.
I hope one day Google will finally adopt "Ask Google" as their slogan, though it might conflict somehow with Ask Jeeves' trademark.