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Mastering Red Hat Linux 9
The book starts out with an introduction to Linux, and has a good chapter on preparing to install, including hardware checklists. This is followed by a very detailed step-by-step explanation of installing Red Hat, both locally and via network. A nice part of this is a troubleshooting chapter for solving installation problems. Part Two explains the basics of using the command line, how filesystems work in Linux, and using the shell for various tasks.
Part Three includes chapters for administering users and groups on your new system, and how the RPM software package management process works. Other chapters in this part explain the bootup process and how to configure it, various ways to perform system backups, and other common administration tasks such as cron jobs and logs. Especially useful should be Chapter 12 which explains how to update/compile your own kernel. There are very good examples of the myriad kernel options, mostly by using the xconfig utility.
The next several chapters go over how to configure and use the X Window display system, including good examples from the XF86Config file. This is followed by detailed explanations of configuring and using the Gnome and KDE desktop environments. The KDE discussion is very good, considering Red Hat is more known for its use of Gnome as the default desktop. Chapter 18 introduces many of the more commonly used graphical applications in Linux, such as OpenOffice.org, Gnome Office, and the KOffice suite. Chapter 19 should be very handy for Linux/RH new users, as it outlines the Red Hat graphical configuration utilities which allow customization of the desktop look-and-feel and other system preferences.
Chapters 20-22 cover basic Linux networking. The first part of this section gives a very understandable primer on TCP/IP and network terminology. This is followed up by excellent discussions on how to setup and manage networking on your Linux computer, including security recommendations and firewall/masquerading methods. Once you've got your network running safely, there are additional chapters which cover topics such as remote access and xinetd services, and various server applications installation and operation. These include DNS, DHCP, CUPS printing operations, FTP servers (and clients), NFS and NIS, and mail servers (sendmail). Some of these services are probably more than most home users would need, and the sendmail operation in particular is a little difficult to understand.
Chapter 29 (Using Samba) will probably be a great help for people desiring to integrate a Linux system with existing Windows computers on a network. It offers an excellent tutorial on how to share files and resources across the LAN, and includes an explanation of the SWAT configuration utility which greatly simplifies initial setup for newcomers. The final chapter in the book explains how to install and setup a basic webserver using the Apache software. The appendix of the book is a relatively short section called the Linux Command Reference. There is some handy information in this, although it seems to be organized somewhat haphazardly. The book's index, on the other hand, seems to be very complete.
Overall, I found this book to be a very useful reference tool. It is basic enough for most beginners to get all the help they need, and has a good amount of usable knowledge for more advanced Linux users. One thing I realized is that much of the information here is not necessarily Red Hat-specific, so it can be helpful to users of other Linux distributions as well.
You can purchase Mastering Red Hat Linux 9 from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
RedHat is off the user linux market. All your skills are belong to us. Should've pursued MCSE or a degree from ITT Tech.
good thing this book came out before the End of Life for Redhat 9, in 5 months.
(yeah, I guess this is a troll)
We're like rats, in some experiment! -- George Costanza
Mastering Red Hat Linux 9 is a huge, very complete guide to Red Hat Linux 9
"Mastering Red Hat Linux 10" will be a thin, very complete leaflet to Red Hat Linux 10 that will have "Switch to Debian now!" written on it in big blood-red letters.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Mastering Fedora Core 0. I mean, hey, get people used to the idea.
You are not the customer.
Man, sucks to be the author. Put months of time into your book, then have the vendor pull support.
Of course there is another side: since there won't be version 10, this will always be the book on the latest and greatest version of Red Hat Linux!
Step one: Install a version of Microsoft Windows, since Linux is not ready for your desktop yet.
This has been a Red Hat approved statement(tm)
with this entire series is that they're very unwieldy and come with a 'orrible binding...the pages usually separate out within 3-4 months.
Also see Teach Yourself Red Hat Linux 9 from sams... I'm using it right now to try Linux out for the first time and it's pretty easy to follow so far.
Oh sorry - yes it will still exist for 5 months :)
"The Complete Guide to Microsoft NT4 Internet Services" and "Push Technology: The Future of Content Distribution".
It must suck to publish and have the product EOLed within six months.
-jaded- walking the earth as a living corpse is in somewhat questionable taste
Even though the content of this book is relevant and probably useful, the title should have been change to reflect more the Mandrake/Fedora Linux distributions. The fact that Red Hat will now be synonymous with their expensive Red Hat Enterprise edition, this will probably limit the audience and sale of this book.
Ruby on Rails Screencast
...given that Fedora is going to be based around Redhat 9, I suppose the (rather poor :-) timing isn't an issue.
:-)
I wonder how many others (than me) are seriously considering moving to debian now that RH9 isn't a 'hold-your-hands' upgradable system (assuming you buy RH update
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
Plenty of folks complaining or pointing the finger that Red Hat will be pulling the plug on RH9 this spring. In my opinion there's even more reason to go buy this book, if you plan on sticking w/ RH9. Why not have a 900 page bible on the OS you plan on sticking with? I know I know, gentoo gentoo gentoo, but in the meantime us newbies can contniue using RH and at least have one decent source to turn to.
Given recent events, does the author now wish he had written Mastering Debian GNU/Linux? I know I sure do.
I get plenty of use out of this big Unix book. In general, online docs like man pages or Google are nice when your machine is working fine and you have a good idea of what you're looking for. But having a nice book on a subject is handy when those conditions don't apply.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
Linux books get charged a sales tax and a SCO tax?
Perhaps, though, this is the point. If Red Hat will no longer support it's consumer products, it's nice to see others take up the cause and continue to push linux further into the desktop market, or at least, provide valuable information Red Hat won't concerning such matters.
Mastering Windows 3.11 from the same author. :)
Seriously, this review belongs in the "It's funny, laugh" department.
Although the impending RHL EOL is not all that "funny" to me....
dinner: it's what's for beer
Just out of interest, does anyone know why GNU is still hanging on to info?
The owls are not what they seem
I am/was busy studying for RHCE, I started out with RHL8, at that point only RHL7 books were available. In due time, RH9 was released and I found myself running 2 versions behind plus Red Hat is very proud of the fact that they switch their exams quickly after a new product release. This was one of the books that I was looking at to use as a study guide as it came highly recommended. Pity about the switch Red Hat has made.At this point in time there are no study books available for RHEL and you might as well forget about RH9.
We are the people our parents warned us about.
Episode 3: Revenge of Redhat
Unknown to the Linux Masters, Senator Redhat makes a secret deal with Microsoft to bring doom and destruction to Linux. As the plan unfolds, the masters realize that they have been betrayed by redhat, but it was too late.
Microsoft's apprentice, SCO, seeks out the linux masters. SCO battles it out with linux, the fight looking unfavorable to sco. Then FreeBSD steps in and knocks the piss out of both of them.
Rumored to be the most powerfulest unix in the universe, The Little D.Mon Master proceeds to show who is the master of unix to sco and linux.
After the fight, the one left standing is D.Mon. D.Mon now angry that a little unknown linux master named Gentoo claimed to be a BSD Like and uber fast and all powerful.
The Freebsd master chuckled, and showed Gentoo masters a little document showing that there is actually a performance loss if one does "-03" compared to regular "-O". The gentoo master refused the truth, but couldnt fight due to emerge not functioning correctly. Instead, the gentoo master was busy trying to get its nvidia drivers working, and recovering from the crasy of "oh darn, -O3 made my system unusable"
FreeBSD took pitty on gentoo, and decided to give gentoo a copy of 4.9 and a nifty handbook, that explains everything, and what a true master unix behaves like.
Now Redhat, responded to the threat of FreeBSD, it incorportated a new weapon called "RHEL". RHEL has a deadly weapon called of "I can run linux apps". Freebsd chuckled, as it said "so can I, but even faster"
Redhat starts to cry, and shows it's new apprentice.. Fedora. Fedora, if you didnt know, is a redheaded stepchild, that was born out of "lets dumped the user".
Meanwhile.... Novel, the old master of File Services, is chuckling....
(continue the story)
Installed Slack 9.1 on all my boxen over the weekend. Well, ok, my wife did a lot of the installs. Slack is up to Kernel 2.4.22 and Gnome 2.4 out of the box. Check it out!
dinner: it's what's for beer
Having my up2date cut off in December (I have RH 8.0) and no upgrade path makes me feel like I'm in a wild west town where the sheriff up'n left us - and the bandits are a-circlin'.
The internet is filled with way too many goofballs writing worms and exploits for Linux and Windoze systems. I need a Linux OS that has an updater, and one that knows how to do a seamless upgrade from RedHat 8.0. I'll PAY $$$!
Good point. I don't have any dummy books (never liked them) but got hooked on Running Linux by O'Reilly and Assoc. when I first got attracted to Linux and now I keep a current copy of it nearby for reference.
Experts should have no trouble skipping over the sections they don't need, though
well thats a nice feature but won't that soon be the entire book??
Isn't Sarge supposed to be the new stable next month? If so, I'm moving to Debian.
I wonder how this book rates with NON GUI subjects. Of the last several books I looked at on RH8, not a single one touched on command line stuff more than an occasional teaser here or there. When you are using one as a headless server, not only no monitor, but X not even installed, all these GUI centric books don't help one iota. It seems like either the authors don't have a clue as to how to administer one via the keyboard, or they just choose to take the 'easy' way to a quick buck.
(Stolen sig) Remember: it's a "Microsoft virus", not an "email virus", a "Microsoft worm", not a "computer worm
man tar
.
.
the en_US locale) should be used both to create the archive and to extract files from the archive.
Last change: 28 Jan 1998 12
Maybe not as current as we'd like?
--Keeping the flame wars alive, one post at a time
Worse is when you run info and get the exact same text as on the man page, up to and including "use info"
RHL is the Dodo bird distro, why create a support book for a product that has a rapidly dimishing half life?
Those that use it in production/business environments will migrate to use the latest and greatest applications before too long and there are incentives for them to goto RHEL sooner rather then later (SCO type discounting if you get in now, on the ground floor ).
As far as RH and it's commitment to desktop/home user/free user, please see Fedora (which they will NOT support, its completely community driven).
Not quite on-topic with the book review, but relevant to the comments discussing life-cycle. If I've observed anything out of the transition from Red Hat Linux to Fedora, which is nowhere near done, it's that a common standard like the LSB and FHS combined with package managet agnostic repository header information is becoming essential. While waiting for FC to come out I installed Debian unstable, and was quickly reminded that the reason I liked Red Hat in the first place was for the awesome config tools. I actually had to get on irc to figure out not only how to configure my USB mouse but also how to get my IDE controller working! Move forward a couple of weeks and FC is out and installed side-by-side with Debian unstable. I hate having to do so much extra legwork to get ntfs and mp3 support. When LSB/FHS compliance are so strong between the major vendors that an app packaged for Debian can be installed on Red Hat and Red Hat's config tools can see/configure it, or Red Hat's config tools can be installed on Debian and produce config files that Debian will be aware of, there will be rejoicing in the streets. RedHat adding yuma dn apt support to up2date is a huge step. Yum is part of the Fedora Core, and apt is on the way, I believe. But having the tool agnostic repo header info will make it all moot. You setup your package repo and magically apt, yum, and up2date can all process dependencies. What a glorious day it will be.
About two weeks ago I decided to try and install Linux on my old K6-2 450mhz machine gathering dust in the basement.
A friend of mine gave me a few cd's that had something called 'Mandrake' on it.
He said "This is supposed to be the most user-friendly 'distro' out there. Give it a try."
So with trepidation about wiping out my beloved win98se install on the old machine, I jumped right in.
On firing up the install disk, the Man-drake installer asked me if I wanted to remove the win98se partition
that already existed. After pondering this for several minutes I though, 'what the hell, I can always
reinstall it!' So I let it fly.
After what seemed like 45 minutes of swapping cd's in-and-out of the drive, the man-drake (isn't that some sort of bird?)
installer ask me what I wanted to use this linux machine for. So many choices! games, office, mail server,
web server, about 2 dozen choices flooded my screen. This is madness! So after carefully considerating my options
I decided to choose them all! I would be a Linux power-user to end all linux power-users!
So after this decision was made I waited. And waited. And waited. During this I started to wonder. My Windows XP
Home intallation on my other Peecee didn't ask me thse kind of questions, and it easily has the all the abilities
that man-drake advertised to have. After all, I paid for WinXP Home. Sigh, I guess this it the price one pays
for being part of the linux elite.
Approximately 50 mintues later I get another prompt from the man-drake installer asking me what kind of GUI I wanted
to use, KDE or GNOME. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice shame on me! I selected both and let it fly.
After only about 20 mintues this time it appeared the install was completed. The mandrake installer told me it
was going to reboot and then I would revel in Linux goodness. I waited with baited breath while the reboot
churned away, eagerly waiting the opportuntity to use the KDE/GNOME interface. Page after page of command line
stuff flew by my screen, seeming to get faster and faster as the time of my linux deliverance approached. Then,
the screen flashed black (kinda like those scenes from the movie Wargames). I gasped and was presented with
something like this:
bsh: blah/blah/blah/ ____
What the hell was this? Wasn't this man-drake linux supposed to be user friendly? Instead of the friendly
confines of a WinXP like GUI instead I was given an ugly DOS like prompt, which looked supiciously like
the TRS-80 system I first learned BASIC on in high school. Is this all the farther the great open-source
movement has progressed?
After serveral minutes of sobbing and knashing of teeth, I came to a decision. All the linux fags out there
were not going to defeat me! They were not going to cry "Bend over WinXP boy, you're going to take linux OUR
WAY and like it!".
I quickly found my old musty copy of 'Unix in a Nutshell' from my college days and got to work. In a few hours
I found out how to start the KDE GUI. This made life so much easier. After several days I was able to get the
machine's 14.4 internal modem working with man-drake and connected to the internet, using a browser called
Mozilla. Where oh where were the glorious pop-ups that appeared as I was surfing porn sites? Those bastards!
After several more days I was starting to feel somewhat comfortable. Using something called Gimp to manipulate
my growing collection of adult images was becoming a habit. And because I was ashamed to let my friends and
neighbors know I was using a gasp! free operating system like mandrake, I kept the pee-cee in the basement. Now
my girlfriend things the sounds emanating from below are me just woodworking or lifting weights. I guess linux has
freed me after all!
CMDRTACO CHECK YOUR EMAIL!
Not entirely accurate, but the sentiment is right. Red Hat won't be paying their employees to backport patches and host them on RHN. Community volunteers are being given a framework to have take over maintenance of packages, and even have their pacakges included as official packages. I anticipate it will be a fair balance between RHL and Debian. You get the community support and package maintenance, combined with a supported framework for third party repositories. But you still get a corporation paying people to develop core pieces. I guess maybe GNOME itself would be a good example. Red Hat has a handful of core GNOME developers on staff, but GNOME also has volunteer developers as official project contributors.
which will continue keeping redhat 7.3 and redhat 9 up to date with all current security patches so you can happily continue to run machine on those distros far into the future... why troll???
tasty electronic music vittles
In my opinion there's even more reason to go buy this book, if you plan on sticking w/ RH9. Why not have a 900 page bible on the OS you plan on sticking with?
The primary reason I liked RHL was the security errata and patching, either through upgrades or backports. Once it it EOL'd, that is gone. What point is there then? I certainly don't want to micromanage every package myself, then I'd much rather go with Debian, Fedora or some other free distro where there's at least some level of coordination.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
First off FSCK you:) I've been using redhat for awhile and dont understand why they'd kill support for 9, 10 is totally different and are forcing people to upgrade, which is about $180 per copy. What advance in price does that have vs windows...
Too Late, now I need the Mastering Fedora FC 1 Book
I have a couple of commercial programs that are supported on RH 7.3 or RH 8. Without support for these versions what distributions are most like them? I did try installing on RH 9 and it didn't work so "not supported on" means more than they won't answer the call.
I'm sorry. But isn't there a problem with a 900 page guide to an operating system? This isn't even advanced server. This is RH9 desktop. This is why I stopped using Linux on my desktop. It took me way more time to learn how to set something up, try to set it up, troubleshoot, and find the dirty hacks than to actually do what I was trying to do. Yes, it ran faster than windows and philosophically better, but I just didn't have time in my life!
So in regards to linux being ready for the prime-time desktop, well I think that it's still a hobbyist's OS. The day when you can plug stuff in and it all just *works* properly will be great. I know Lycoris and Lindows are working toward this, but doesn't it seem like they're just layering wrappers upon wrappers on top of the fundamentally unelegant backend? Take USB keys for example. You need to have SCSI compiled to use them. Why???
Sorry for the rant. But I see many posts making fun of 900 pages, and many posts making fun of RH not being ready for the desktop, but if you look at things from a realistic perspective, it's just *not ready* for mainstream. RH is not an idealistic company. They are reealistic, want to make money, and are succeeding at it, so I'd tend to think they know what they're talking about. Maybe linux is ready for tightly controlled office settings where you have homogenous hardware, set it up so it all works dandy, don't touch it and pray it doesn't break down, but it's not good where you have people with many diverse needs from their computers.
Mod me down, burn me at the stake, but this really is a personal reaction to all the "+5 Funny" posts on this page.
There's a book, Red Hat Linux X: The Complete Reference DVD Edition (no refid ;-), listed on amazon.com supposedly to be released December 3. Despite the cover, one of the authors' homepages (Haddad) just has "Red Hat Linux" and a November 2003 release, so I guess they're fixing or have fixed it.
Saddly this book is focused on a product that has only 5 months of life.
I expect to see books focusing on the Enterprise version soon tough. Hopefully they will talk about the advanced features of the ES family of RedHat and not on the stuff you can find for free on the Linux Documentation project, for example.
Jose Vicente Nunez Zuleta RHCE, SJCD, SJCP
Well, for starters RedHat and SuSE don't document half their stuff. Try typing man yast2 on a SuSE system, or man redhat-config-network on a RedHat system.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Last change: 28 Jan 1998 12
Maybe not as current as we'd like?
Maybe nothing has changed since then?
www.vanheusden.com - home of Multitail, HTTPing, CoffeeSaint, EntropyBroker, rsstail, bsod, listener, nagcon, nagi
I am writing this from Redhat 9. I use this box for one simple task. Web browsing. that's it. I did a simple user install, haven't tried anything my mom or other general users could not do.
...now at the mom@fubarLinux Mom] prompt type ps -u mom, see the name mozilla-bin? no? ok click the scroll bar up....see it? yes! (whew) what is the number on the far left of that line...5465, ok now type kill 5465. ok, now click the netscape icon again. ok, talk to you again tomorrow.
In order to properly navigate the internet from this RedHat 9 box, I need only mozilla and just one extra program...terminal.
terminal is for killing hung mozilla sessions, I have to do this daily.
ready for desktop? depends on your definition of "ready". I know my mom would have no idea how to handle a stuck browser. I can imagine the phone call...ok, open a terminal session..click the red hat, then click system tools...then click terminal...
if mozilla can stand tall though this paragraph I may actually be able to po
One of the general rules of moderating, if I remember, is to try to mod up more than you mod down. This guy does have a point. It might not be one you agree with, but some people (myself included) find online resources much more useful than 1000pg books.
:)
I'm sure you can find something better to do with your mod points than mark people as troll
no comment
RedHat - Babylon IX Our last, best chance for support
This is really really silly.
A 900 page book on Unix and Unix-like OSes (Linux, etc.) is probably about right. Hell, Nemeth and co. managed to fit four OSes into a book about that sized.
Now a 900 page book on a single version of a single distribution of Linux is crazy overkill! Have they copied the man pages (oops--info shitty pages) verbatim, or is Linux (between distros and also between versions within a distro) so badly unstandardised and non-static that it needs a book this big, per version/distro/OS?
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
I mean, come on. People are making it seem like Redhat is dead or that they're abandoning the product. Like if you install RH9 it's a dead product.
Do we have to spell it out for the ones that choose not to think? RH9 is not dead. If you install it, the upgrades are going through Fedora now. I know this because I "upgraded" to Fedora from RH-9 on one box.
OR you can choose to go the Enterprise route.
Freedom of choice baby!
Why are some people missing this?
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
First let me say I was a RedHat fan, but I don't think Fedora is this guys solution.
Yes he might get updates with up2date, but his product will NOT be supported in any way from RedHat. The purpose of Fedora appears to be to get the latest "somewhat stable" software to the masses and let them bang on it to find bugs. Then RedHat will take the best of breed of that software and incorporate it in to ES.
My advice to the guy is to buy RedHat ES for $300 and plan on paying RedHat $300 a year for the rest of that servers life. He could do that or switch to a different distro.
The more I learn about science, the more my faith in God increases.
Besides the usual Microsofties using the story to blast Linux (which is probably the ONLY reason they frequent
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
The way I look at it is, with the lack of constantly revising the kernel, maybe now they will come out with some standards, an API toolkit, and support for hardware made in the last five years. Yes, that's not completely true about the hardware, but have you tried to install any version of Linux on a new machine and had all the devices work right out of the box. I have access to a large variety of laptops, most of them being Toshiba models, with some Dell, Hitachi, and Compaqs. I gave up after trying to install on 12 different models of laptops. All of them had some problem with graphics, sound, chipsets, controllers, or network interfaces. The manufacturers refer you to the parts makers, the parts makers refer you to XFree or some other linux group, and the linux groups refer you to the manufacturers. It's seems like noone cares if it doesn't work on your machine, you should get a different machine. I've actually been told to write my own drivers if I wanted it to work. Hmmm, Microsoft has never asked me to write drivers before, but of course, they actually work with the parts makers and equipment manufacturers.
Maybe because when there isn't an info version you get the man file?
I hate info, almost as much as apps that only have bad HTML docs in 400 little screen-sized files.
Referral Link: Amazon has this book for the same price as bn and with free shipping
Here's how:
Go to http://www.suse.com . Splurge $35 on Suse 9. Put the sticker on your windshield.
Install Suse 9. Keep your NTFS, as you can resize, mount and read/write without additional software. Log in to Suse. Type Alt+F2. Type "yast2".
That's all you need to configure hardware, software, networking, and windows shares.
Thanks, but unless I'm taking a course on the OS/language/app/suite/platform/or whatever the hell else these "authors" think is worth a 1000 page book on, I'll stick to my "tried and true problem solving methodology."(tm)
Linux:
1) --help, 2) man, 3) How Tos, 4) Google, 5) IRC, 6) send an email to that majordomo guy, 7) Give up and install something else. 8) Repeat.
Windows:
1) Download it again, 2) Run it,...shit! 3) Download it again, 4) Run it,...fuck! 5) Ask roommate if he's ever had x problem...nope. 6) Give up. Go out, have fun, get drunk, get lucky. Forget about your computer.Buy a book on it? Spend money for something that's definitely not going to enlighten me with one candela worth of recent info? Not.
Someone in these comments asked "Why write a book on something that will be obsolete in 5 months."
The answer is probably "cause we'll make some money on it (or at least break even) And the author'll get his name on slashdot."
There is something wonderful in seeing a wrong-headed majority assailed by truth. ~John Kenneth Galbraith
The big difference between RH8 and RH9 is native posix threads library support (NPTL). This breaks some of the binaries from commercial vendors like Oracle and IBM. Usually you can work around this by setting an environment variable:
export LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.2.5
Good Luck!
Try man info.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
I haven't had to kill Epiphany in a long time, but with Fedora, the desktop keeps track of whether the application reacts to a close window request. If nothing happens, a prompt will appear, asking whether to kill the application. It works very nicely.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
So this is no different from a Red Hat 8 book. It covers most of Fedora Core apart from the new features, including the new up2date client with um and apt support, GUI bootup, screen res switching tool, OpenOffice 1.1.
That said, I can appreciate that it must indeed suck for the author now that Fedora is having regular 6 month stable releases.
fedora legacy will provide updates to redhat 7.3 and 9. http://fedora.redhat.com/participate/terminology.h tml
tasty electronic music vittles
Please explain how one Open Source project (Fedora) is some how "dumping the user" whereas another (FreeBSD) isn't.
"Mastering Red Hat Linux 10" will be a thin, very complete leaflet to Red Hat Linux 10 that will have "Switch to Debian now!" written on it in big blood-red letters.
People who brought this book also purchased "How to be a rabid Slashdot Debian zealot in 24 hours for dumb idiots visually in full color"
I don't see why this should be any indication of the quality of a book. Some of my favorite books have been "newbie" books because they can be referred to quickly.
That's Smart. Wake up. RH just gut shot the argument that open source is immune to vendor lock in. They deserve more scorn than SCO, because they've made everyone who advocated them for business look like idiots.
This isn't about your bedroom box. Fedora is being marketed as a toy that gets updated every few months with no updates for previous releases, only fixes going forward. It's the enterprise product customers who are really getting screwed.
This is about tens of thousands of installs at thousands of *businesses* which *must* be carried out in the next few months in conjunction with a tripling of licensing fees, or a massive migration to a new system (fat chance).
Gee, I'm sure those CIO's who advocated linux are going to look really smart when their RHE implementations require bare metal installs and now cost 3 to 6 times what they did when the deal was struck. Wow, linux is looking much cheaper now doesn't it? What do you suppose the TCO on that prospect looks like?
Let's review:
RedHat is forcing a migration to a new subscription system which is substantially more expensive than its old one. Hmmm, why does this sound so familiar? What happened to a certain famous monopoly which tried the same thing a few months ago? Oh that's right, the customers bolted to... wait for it... Linux (namely RedHat).
But wait-- RedHat's not a monopoly... where's the monopoly power? isn't that like showing up at a gun fight with a pen knife? Oops.
Yeah, they're some real fucking geniuses over there at RH. Watch the pretty company implode.
and I doubt they ever will. pro forma profits aren't real, they're pro forma. RedHat made it into the backroom on the recommendations of the people they just royally fucked over. I don't know why people here can't see that it is the RHEL customers who *really* got screwed with this deal.
what kind of crack are you smoking to get such an idea?
tasty electronic music vittles
gee, I wonder if they tell you any of this stuff in the book:
/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts after you run the adsl-setup in /etc/ppp) file where whoever was responsible for the code that makes the file reversed two important variables (timeout and interval!) ...
1) If you are using pppoe as your internet connection then if you use the redhat version of rp-pppoe that comes with the install you are most likely screwed if you have no previous Linux and/or redhat experience. Why? Because those friendly redhat re-programmers really did a nice job on the setup script.
There is this really *LOVELY* bit in the ifcfg-ppp0 (in
so there is tons of fun to be had while it connects for 20 seconds and reconnects for 20 seconds and re
2) Redhat added this "feature" where if there is no default route (DHCP or a set one) then you get to see that address that microsoft likes to set for you too: 169.254.0.0 Man, that floored me the first time it popped up during the debugging of (1) (looked at route -n)
(see http://linux.dbw.org/notes/static-routes.txt)
SO, if you are like me and decided to put redhat 9 on the machine that connects you the rest of the world (which is what most home users are going to do as they usually don't have 4 or 5 computers like some of us *grin*) and you have a pppoe connection - well! - redhat NICELY adds the 169.254 as your default route to whatever NIC has an address SO that after that when ppp0 comes up and tries to set the default route to itself the routing tabled stays wonked OR ppp0 simply does not come up.
It took three days of free time (i.e. normally sleep time) for me to take care of all of that and I work with servers ALL the time.
So:
1) I can see why redhat might say that Linux is not ready for the desktop. It ain't if they can't handle stuff like internet connections. Then again, maybe they were confusing Redhat with Linux. (cause, shit, if I did this on Slack or Deb I would have used the original stuff from roaring penguin!)
2) I hope that this book is aptly titled because there sure as hell better be a section explaining everything I found above. Otherwise the word in the title - "Mastering" - is suspect.
- Jeff -
Together with the online man(1) command and O'Reilly's UNIX Power Tools and Essential System Administration, that's about what you need. If you don't want to buy read the latter, get your system administrator to do it, which even saves you loads of time...
no, i would imagine that the Fedora Linux Project will be supporting 7.3 and 9 as long as they think its helpful, which of course depends on how many people continue to use them.
tasty electronic music vittles
Offtopic, but... Summer of this year seems alright.
jrodman@Skonnos:~> man info
Reformatting info(1), please wait...
INFO(1) User Commands INFO(1<)
NAME
info - read Info documents
[...]
General Public License. For more information about these matters, see
the files named COPYING.
info 4.6 June 2003 INFO(1)
-josh