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GNU/Linux For Dummies: A Brief Survey
You've decided to take the plunge -- there's an unused computer in the corner, you're looking for a way to fill that new 20 GB hard drive, or you've gone all out with a shiny new machine and Windows tax be darned! It's time to figure out this Linux thing. How do you start? If your local computer guru blanches at the thought of a command line, or if you have that stubborn "I'll figure it out if I have to stay up all night" streak that characterizes so many successful hackers, perhaps a book will come in handy.
Over the next few weeks, we'll be taking a look at a handful of randomly selected texts from various publishers. Their scopes and intended audiences range from nascent beginner to somewhat experienced existing user. Some walk you through installation and some expect you already know what to do right after you log in. They all purport to be your guide to the sometimes confusing, occasionally maddening, and even often rewarding world of Linux. Which one, if any, is right for you? Hopefully we'll answer that question.
Linux ... for Dummies? This week, our books come from IDG's popular "Dummies" series (but we'll skip the obvious question begging). These three books are fundamentally the same, undoubtedly due to the venerable maddog's presence as common author. Generic Linux information appears almost verbatim, and some chapters differ only in phrasing. Some information is rearranged, and the chapter on using X is different among the three (two focus on KDE, one on GNOME). A description of one book will give you a general idea of the other two. Of course, there's distribution specific information, specifically relating to installation and certain administration tasks.Why would you buy these books? They provide detailed installation instructions and supply recent CDs of the titular distributions. They also provide decent -- if basic -- introductions to simple commands and standard tasks. The installation chapters have sufficient detail to walk nearly anyone through the process, including dual-booting techniques, tips on discovering hardware information in Windows, selecting the desired packages, and creating sane partitions. (With 5 chapters devoted to navigating the shiny installers, the only thing preventing success is hardware failure or sunspots.) If you follow the directions, you'll have a decently-equipped workstation capable of accessing the Internet through a modem.
Once your new Linux system is installed, what can you do? There's a tutorial on command-line basics, discussing the Unix file system and basic file commands. You'll meet the bash shell, with pipes and job controls and even a little shell programming. The vi editor also gets a bit of explanation -- follow the instructions and you'll know enough to edit files. (Pull out the command reference card from the front of the book just in case you forget :wq.)
It's on to X, after that. Here the books diverge again. After explaning the basics of X and whichever Desktop Environment the distribution prefers, the authors describe a few common tasks and programs and leave you to explore. Some basic system administration tasks get the spotlight -- file maintenance, adding a new disk, or installing software. (Don't expect to pull down $90,000/year on an entry-level SysAdmin job after this section. The SuSE and Caldera books do discuss building a new kernel, though.)
Appendixes include hardware compatibility lists and a description of the Linux man page format.
title SuSE Linux for Dummies [ISBN: 0764506811] publisher IDG Books Included Stuff SuSE 6.2 CD-ROM Intended Audience Linux newcomers who aren't afraid to install it themselves. Little prior computing experience necessary. Scope Installation and basic introduction to Linux. Technical Correctness No glaring errors. Writing style Highly informal. May be too verbose for more technical readers. Other Focuses on KDE, where applicable. System administration tasks take place with YaST, SuSE's homebrew tool.
There's not a lot of space given to common applications beyond Netscape and vi. A quick tour of KDE will probably give users enough confidence to plumb the depths of the KDE menus themselves, but the "What Now?" feature might bite after closing the back cover.
title Caldera OpenLinux for Dummies [ISBN 076450679X] publisher IDG Books Included Stuff OpenLinux 2.3 CD-ROM Intended Audience same Scope same Technical Correctness same Writing style Highly informal, even a bit chatty. Other Focuses on KDE. System administration tasks use COAS (the Caldera Open Administration System).
This book has more information on exploring and customizing KDE, but also doesn't go into detail on user applications. (Even mentioning something like KOffice, AbiWord, or StarOffice would have been nice.)
title RedHat Linux for Dummies [ISBN 0764506633] publisher IDG Books Included Stuff RedHat Linux 6.1 and complete source on CD-ROMs. Intended Audience same Scope A bit more information than the other two books, mostly on Linux applications. Technical Correctness same Writing style Rather informal, though less so than the other two books. Other Focuses on GNOME. Uses Linuxconf to perform system administration.
It would appear that Paul Sery rewrote large portions of his book. While maddog's anecdotes in the other two are from the first person, the corresponding sections are in the third person perspective. Whatever the explanation, there's between 20 and 30 extra pages of information in here (including RPM and ipchains basics). There's more time spent exploring the shell and command line before diving into a tour of X applications, too, like Applixware and Wine. I preferred this book over the other two due to the extra information and the better organization of topics.
Conclusion:Someone who's already used to the Dummies series, is comfortable with the idea of installing Linux for herself, and wants a hand to hold through the process would enjoy these books. The knowledge imparted by these books -- giving extremely detailed installation instructions (follow the screenshots) but leaving a user with basic shell knowledge and some idea of how to navigate KDE or GNOME menus -- probably needs a supplement. I'm not sure enough information is presented to allow nascent hackers to figure things out for themselves. Still, for the intended audience, you get an introduction and the CDs in a convenient package.
You can purchase these books at Fatbrain: Take your pick from [SuSE Linux, Caldera OpenLinux, Red Hat Linux] For Dummies.
You can't win... if you omit female pronouns you are accused of being sexist ["Females don't matter enough to be mentioned huh?"] but if you DO include them in an innocent, if somewhat careless [these days one must be careful who one breathes in the presense of], fashion you get accused of being sexist.
... far..
/. ? Is no place safe from Big Brother [and Sister]?
brain... hurts... PC... stupidity... gone... too
On a related note, when did the PC police start to invade
-={(Astynax)}=-
-={(Astynax)}=-
"Darkness beyond Twilight"
All it takes is a willingness for the person to acknowledge "I'm buying a beginner's book on the subject, therefore it's obvious I don't know anything about the subject, so it's ok for me to call myself a dummy regarding that subject". It works for anybody. I always find myself wanting to pick up "Mutual Funds for Dummies" and "Classical Music for Dummies", but I can just never find the time to read them.
I never had as much luck with the "Complete Idiots" series. The logic of "Ok, I call myself a dummy, so I guess it's ok for them to call me a dummy" does not extend to letting yourself be called a complete idiot.
I had a chance to contribute to a dummies book (StarOffice). They have a very specific template that says exactly how to write such a book, and they don't like you leaving the pattern at all. The template can pretty much be summed up as "Lots of numbered bullet lists, with plenty of screen shots." :)
Duane
Speaking of titles, I was once asked to work on a book that the guy said would be called "Kickass J++ Game Programming." I said that I thought that was a pretty risky title that people might find offensive. I never heard back from him, but I also never saw the book on the shelves, either.
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
No sexism implied here, I think. Throughout this whole series, I've been looking at these books from the point of view of my mother. Could someone who's used a computer for simple tasks for a few years learn how to use Linux from a book?
She's in the market for a new computer, and she wants Linux on it. (Now that Gnucash does everything she'd been using Quicken for, the only thing standing in the way is the OfficeJet.)
I've given her the RedHat book to read, and I think she can handle it. Then it's off to another book in this series of articles, because there's so much more to learn.
Thus, the reason for the feminine pronoun in this case is because I had a specific example in mind.
--
how to invest, a novice's guide
There is a chapter on this.
Accessing your FAT hard disk and mounting floppies are also covered.
No need, as Netscape 4.7x on Linux looks just like Netscape 4.7x on Windows, which is covered in The Internet for Dummies.
Is the package manager in the index? If so, there's more than likely a section on installing apps.
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!
Will I retire or break 10K?
I bought the Linux for Dummies book about 2 years ago, when it came bundled with RedHat 5.0. I was a relative newbie to linux. I'd installed it and played with it for about a month when I decided that I needed some help.
That book helped me draw the necessary mental connections to relate my DOS knowledge to linux.
The CLI's complexity faded away in a matter of a few days.
Linux For Dummies isn't the same as "Electronic devices for Dummies". We all were linux newbies at some point, but many of us had been using computers for years before then.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
> can't figure out the difference between
> an array and a list
Huh?
Is there a difference between an array and a list in perl?
I'm not trying to defend what's obviously a very poor book, but I wonder where Tom's coming from here.
A list such as (0,1,2,3)
and an array e.g. @a = (0,1,2,3)
don't differ in any fundamental way in perl.
Do they?
Even Tom himself refers to lists as arrays in the perl documentation.
I quote:
"A list of lists, or an array of an array if you would, is just a regular old array..."
Of course I haven't read the book TC is bitching about, so there is presumably something in there that's completely wrong.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
The review indicates that there is an edition for COREL, why wasn't it reviewed?
Personally, my favorite intro book was The No B.S. Guide to Red Hat Linux 6. But I actually had the First Edition which came with Slackware. Ahhhh, you never forget your first distro!
Work for Change & GET PAID!
I saw C for dummies after I already had quite a bit of experience with the language, and the book disgusted me. Besides being (I think) longer than K&R for much less content, the book tried to avoid all the vocabulary, and certainly didn't define much of it. The author, among other things, described the preprocessor as an arcane, largely useless feature, and said that he almost never used it. And much of the book was just useless blathering and lame attempts at humor. And don't even get me started on C++ for dummies.
(I'll get to "Linux for Dummies" in a moment...)
/proc filesystem, pulling out cards and reading the numbers on the chips, and doing a bunch of web and netnews searches, I was able to identify the chip on the ethernet controller.
My biggest gripe about Red Hat is their inadequate documentation and support.
IMHO, an install is not complete until you can/have:
- Gotten all the ordinary peripherals working.
- Tuned the graphic interface into comfortable usability.
- Connected to your ISP or gotten up on your LAN, as applicable.
- Rebuilt the equivalent of the installed kernel from source. ("Hello, kernel build world!\n")
- Downloaded and installed any post-release patches.
The documentation should walk you through all of that, cookbook style. "Type this. Push that button. Insert this disk." And if it doesn't, and you've paid for "instalation support", the company should bloody well SUPPORT you until you get to the equivalent point. (And cookbook patch install should be available no later than the first set of patches.)
I've been using Unix for decades, and hacked Linux drivers on a Cobalt Qube and some company Intel boxes a few years back, so I'm not a complete newbie.
But last winter I decided to abandon "My Three Suns" and Solaris, and switch my home net to a new OS for the millenium. (No more closed source and closed hardware designs for me!)
So I bought my first Intel-based machine since the 8080. I picked Linux over *BSD due to the larger developer base. And I shelled out the premium for a Red Hat distribution, mainly because it promised install support.
I'd expected problems with the Winmodem. But you can imagine my annoyance when:
- The ethernet card didn't talk to the LAN.
- There was no documentation (readily findable) that would tell how to adjust the resolution of the video driver (so I could take advantage of my shiny new multi-megapixel monitor).
- There was no documentation on how to build a kernel (in the package OR on the web site).
- Attempts to build the kernel, from the supplied sources, using what I believed to be the normal approach, crashed. ("make boot" says: "System is too big. Try using bzImage or modules.", making me suspect the supplied sources and their READMEs don't match the distribution build.)
- Red Hat considered their prepaid support committment to end once you had "installed" sufficiently that you could boot the machine and log in. They refused to help with a kernel build. They had no clue about the ethernet card (even after I identified it for them). "Configuring a kernel is beyond install. If kernel build is necessary to drive the card it's an unsupported card."
- Their web site (accessable through another computer, thank goodness!) was about as helpful as their phone support.
So I had to hack it.
- By looking through the
- Reading the source showed that the corresponding driver recognized that the particular model of the ethernet chip also understood homenet (think 1-megabit LAN on your home phone lines), and was hardcoded to use ONLY that mode whan that model chip was installed.
- Patching the driver to use the chip only in ethernet mode, hand-compiling the modified driver, substituting it for the module loaded by the modload distribution kernel, got me on the LAN.
Then I hacked my old sendmail configuration into the puppy, debugged THAT, and had everything working a few hours before local midnight. And missed the newyears party.
But that didn't deal with any of the other problems - like the sound card, the monitor resolution, or getting to where I could rebuild the kernel and hack drivers for new toys. (Not to mention the Winmodem, of course.) My brand-new multi-kilobuck box was just barely up and limping. (Eight months later I moved the printer to the Red Hat box and discovered that the printer driver module wasn't loaded - because they'd left a line out of a config file - and they STILL didn't have anything about it on their web site.)
Can you IMAGINE a WinTel user, testing the waters on Linux, in this situation?
And it's not like this was TOTALLY oddball hardware. It was a brand-shiny-new, top-of-the-line, Compaq Presario Athlon box. (But not SO new it should have been unsupported.) Compaq DOES like to do things their own way. But they're one of the biggest brands, and at the time they'd supposedly had an alliance with Red Hat for months.
Needless to say, I was PISSED at Red Hat. I'd just gotten out of the hospital for pneumonia, and this was NOT how I'd intended to spend all that was left of my winter holiday.
I do have a day job, guys! With my limited spare time chewed up by this bogosity I still, after 8 months, haven't had a chance to play with drivers for new toys, or even do a really proper job of configuring the box for everyday use.
And now I see that the "Linux for Dummies" books cover kernel build for the SuSE and Caldera distributions, but not for Red Hat. At first I was ticked off all over again, but then I began to wonder... Do I detect a pattern? Maybe THEY had similar problems with lack of kernel build support for Red Hat, and decided to skip it.
Needless to say, absent a major housecleaning in Red Hat's documentation and support departments, my next upgrade won't be to another Red Hat distribution.
Or maybe it will even be to a BSD.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
> Don't expect to pull down $90,000/year on an entry-level SysAdmin job after this section.
For that, you need to buy System Administration For Greedy Mothers Who Don't Want To Pay Their Dues.
Chapter 1: Writing Your Resume
Chapter 2: Bluffing Your Way Through The Interview
Chapter 3: Which Books To Hide Under Your Desk
Chapter 4: When Disaster Strikes: How To Pass The Buck
Appendix A: Important Buzzwords To Memorize
Appendix B: Understanding The PHB
Appendix C: Who Can You Sue?
Appendix D: Learning To Get By On Less When You Go Back To Flipping Burgers
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Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
It isn't really in depth, it just has a list of most of the common commands, their usage, and the most common options. As such, it has probably gotten more day-to-day use than any 600+ page manual that might be on my bookshelf.
Short, to the point, and it gets the job done. Seems like a perfect match. =) It should definetly get included with the books reviewed above.
--sugarman--
On the contrary, my baptism by fire occurred at about age 10 when I accidentally deleted some critical system files (um, along with wordperfect) from our brand spanking new computer. I spent long nights with my nose embedded in tomes of DOS 4.0 books to escape the ire of my parents.
Sometimes the best thing to do is just bang the stuff into your brain with manuals. After the soreness wears off, you'll probably be left with something more substantial.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
I love these books, but only if used properly: as an introduction to the basics. There has been several times that I need to take a plunge into something I've never done before (buying a house comes to mind). The for Dummies book provides a good foundation--clear and simple definitions of terms, stripped down and to-the-point examples, etc. Essentially I use the books as a way of learning the language of a particular topic so I can ask further questions in the areas I need help on.
--
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
This isn't a reflection on the books though, just the titles.
Founder's Camp
Founder's Camp
News for non-Nerds. Stuff that matters.
s/SuSE/RedHat/g
s/SuSE/Caldera/g
s/KDE/Gnome/g
heh-heh, a neat trick at least for Maddog and Paul Sery.
Perhaps you should read the book "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance"...it is a somewhat interesting perspective on that concept.
Indeed. Here's a link to an online version
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DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
Followed by the even more unnerving "Parenting for Dummies."
How many support calls start out like this:
"This is probably REALLY simple but..."
"I'm a complete moron when it comes to these things, so how do I..."
"You'll have to excuse my ignorance but I've never done this before,"
"I just did this the other day and I've already forgotten how, can you tell me how to...."
Now try saying the same thing to a sex therapist.... HAH faaaaantastic!
- Toby
7 years ago when I was around 13, I found C a perplexing langauge until I found C For dummies Vol1, and 2. I didnt ever need a dummies book about programming, but the gentle introduction helped me learn period versus being in some gray haze with my friends K&R, Book on C.
Now I program for a living and dont have but those two For dummies books..
BUT, I think anyone who would ever go so far as to say the books are for idiots are wrong.
These kind of books can help people who may otherwise lose intrest become very knowledgeable.
And go on.. to become sucessful in a Techie type career. So Dont knock emm not everyone learns the same.
Jeremy
IMHO, I'd like to see chapters on the following, if anyone's writing other Linux Newbie guides:
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Unfortunately I have no moderator access, else I would moderate you up (moderators: hint hint). It is indeed a very interesting book, certainly considering the difference between classic/romantic people.
:-)
'Romantical' people just use technology, but don't want to know how it works. It's not that they *could* not understand, it's more like, they just don't *want* to.
'Classical' people use technology, wanting to understand it. These people would -for example- build their own computers, rather than buying one at the local retailer (with Win98 pre-installed)
The book is an interesting read, note however that it does not have anything to do with computers
FYI, the author is Robert Pirsig.
Every expression is true, for a given value of 'true'
It would seem to me that, while a guide to installation and basic command line info would be useful, complete newbies to Linux would probably begin by wondering how they can do the same things under Linux that they do under Windows. And for most people, this does not mean using an editor like vi or writing shell scripts. It means connecting to the Internet, using e-mail, web browsing, and word processing. From this review, it appears that these books do not explain how to do all of this under Linux. If not, I would thinkk that the average newbie Linux user would find these books disappointing, or, even worse, they may decide that these tasks cannot be done in Linux without resorting to the CLI. A good introduction to Linux, in my opinion, should cover installation and the use of a user-friendly GUI (like KDE or Gnome). It should explain how to set up an Internet connection, how to run Mozilla or Netscape, and the use of StarOffice or KOffice (when it becomes stable, that is) or some other office suite. Someone who buys "Linux for dummies" probably won't be using the command line very soon. Leave that for a later book, once they know how to do what they need to and they're interested in learning more.
Matt Reece
I believe that the true benefit of these books is more of an eye-opener for many individuals who would not normally open a book that says 'linux' on the cover. If they see 'dummies' associated with 'linux', some people might recognize that the OS is not quite as complex as some of the common news sources report it is. It won't hurt the linux community to have some more publicity by the sale of these books.
-=MeMpHiStO=-