Learning Red Hat LINUX: Guide to Red Hat LINUX for New Users

With roughly 20 million users worldwide, Linux is the most talked about success story of open source and free software. Even devotees of Microsoft Windows and Apple's Macintosh are attracted by the unsurpassed stability and flexibility of Linux, but learning a Unix-style operating system can be a daunting task. The second edition of Learning Red Hat Linux gives newcomers exactly what they need to get started.

The book includes a complete Linux system CD-ROM from Red Hat Software, one of the most popular distributions of Linux in the U.S. Once it guides beginners through the process of installing and configuring this software, the book offers a thorough but gentle introduction to the basics of using Red Hat Linux. This new edition has been "upgraded" to cover installation and configuration of Red Hat version 7.2, with improved sections on how to use the GNOME and KDE desktop environments, and how to use the Red Hat Package Manager (RPM). Highlights of Learning Red Hat Linux include:

How to prepare your system for installing Linux
How to install and configure Linux
How to install and configure the X Window System
How to use X and the GNOME and KDE desktop environments
How to obtain and set up Linux applications
How to set up a Linux system for networking, either on your local area network (LAN), or via a dialup connection to the Internet
How to install and configure Linux-based servers, including the Apache web server and Samba for integrated file and print services with Windows-based networks
How to understand and write shell scripts to extend the power of Linux
How to install, upgrade, and remove packages using RPM

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The economics of the free software business has taken another football bounce with the release of O'Reilly's Learning Red Hat Linux, a guide to the most popular distribution of the freely redistributable operating system. The bounce is this: for the typical tech-book list price of , you get Bill McCarty's beginners' survey and Red Hat 7.2, a value at Red Hat's own retail price. McCarty's introduction claims that the two-CD set, printed with the O'Reilly logo, contains "everything you need to install and configure your own Red Hat Linux system." But is it really Red Hat 7.2? Yes, according to one Red Hat official, but like batteries, support is sold separately for a month. Economics militate in favor of purchasing the book as well as a separate support contract from Red Hat, if needed. The book is, then, the freebie, and consequently a good deal.

McCarty follows his nose through the installation procedure and annotates each step with do's and don'ts; e.g., do use the "custom" install mode rather than "server" or "workstation" if you don't want to lose existing data on the hard drive. He intuits just what the new Linux user will want to do: configure X11, connect to ISP over a modem or LAN, use e-mail, run Samba over the network to read a PC hard drive, configure and start an Apache Web server, and configure a basic firewall. His chapter on RPM, the Red Hat Package Manager, is brief but useful, and his one-page discussion of the Red Hat Network -a-month support option is far too brief to be useful, but contains enough hints to allow a new member to keep expectations modest.

Brevity and velocity are the book's strengths, as McCarty glides from the highlights of one configuration protocol to another. Error recovery is ignored in favor of tips and hints on error avoidance. Larger issues in system administration strategies are unevenly treated: partitioning theory, dual booting, and backing up are skipped. Loading kernel modules dynamically is not discussed, and neither is kernel compiling, and the ubiquitous DHCP client is introduced only after the rather advanced DHCP server is discussed. To round out the knowledge base, I recommend Matt Welch's peerless Running Linux as the entry point for serious Linux system administration.

In his hurry, McCarty blurs distinctions between Linux distributions, leaving the reader wondering why Red Hat is singled out for book-length coverage. But his single biggest omission is an introduction to linuxdocs.org and the indispensable world of HOWTOs. Rather, reference to HOWTOs is relegated to an appendix on the boot process.

Ultimately, Learning Red Hat Linux should be viewed as an inexpensive way to obtain legitimate CDs of Red Hat 7.2, with installation documentation that exceeds the norm. Once the installation has either succeeded or failed, however, readers will want to move along to linuxdocs.org or Running Linux. --Peter Leopold ...Read more

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