Rating: 
Summary: Fairly useful guide to installing/using Linux
Review: I bought this book primarily because of the three different installation packages that comes with the book. (Red Hat 4.1, Slackware 96 and Caldera OpenLinux Lite).
The book itself was fairly broad in scope, trying to cover the basics of Linux on two versions. Caldera's installation receives only a short chapter. The book repeats a lot of information when covering installation, but does a thorough job.
I was particularly dissapointed in the coverage of Xwindows, the information provided was barely adequate.
Rating: 
Summary: might be a brief admin help book but useless for day to day
Review: I bought this book to help with RH5.1 configuration and PPP dial up to my ISP> I found nothing about day to day operations and nothing was in there about diapup. I do not recmmend this book to anyone and I think I will wait till the new edition fo the unleashed Redhat linux book comes out.
Rating: 
Summary: Great Book!!! Great Software!!!
Review: I can not say enough about this book, from helping you get your linux machine onto the net , to configuring your sound , cd-rom , network cards, modem.If you are going to buy one book for Linux , look no further.Any machine that I sell will have this book with it. 10 STARS to all at Caldera and and Que! Thanks for making Linux fun!!!!
Rating:
Summary: Two thumbs up
Review: I have accumulated 4-5 Linux books in the past 5 years, so I struggled a long while before I got this book as I am neither a great fan of Que's books, nor the in any way enthusiastic about getting a year-old book (especially in the fast changing world of Linux!) Anyway I got it in the end after browsing all Caldera and general Linux titles in a local bookstore - and looking back I never regretted my decision.I find this book extraordinary in the breadth and depth it covers. It has very good coverage on a wide range of topics in addition to the usual installation and configuration and common sysadmin tasks that is present in most Linux books, and the authors had a lot of insight into the topics (I was skimming through the sections on pgp, ssh, tcp wrappers and firewalls and learned a lot from it). It is, at the same time, very well written and easy to read and gave me much less headache than reading the howto's, man pages, RFCs, or my Linux Bible! My only criticism is that it is sometimes a bit application-oriented (e.g. it was focussing mainly on swat in the Apache configuration chapter and did not cover manual configuration nor gave explanation of the Apache directives). In general I find the book well structured and very well written and I definately hope to see the authors continue to update the with the new features of the new versions of Caldera Linux.
Rating: 
Summary: This is book has the breadth & depth but not for newbies
Review: I have been fiddling w RH linux for over a year, most books i come across are for the beginner's level, I feel this book (although for Caldera OL)is for more advanced users; intermediate and above. I felt I needed to voice out that some of the reviews are unfair as it seems those guys are newbies and should be looking for other books. By the way, I got this book from the library : ) I may consider buying a new copy though. PS: for the newbies, you really have to be patient to get the hang of linux, it helps with an expert around if not borrow books that teach 1. Shell & editor 2. X windows 3. Networking And of course experiment alot and camp on the usenet. For ease of installation OpenLinux2.3 is definitely more user friendly than RH6.0, stick with the easy one and change later when your skills have improved Rgds
Rating:
Summary: Disappointing - worth only half a star.
Review: I have copies of the second edition, and the fourth edition, 1999 reprint. The second edition is Slackware oriented, and comes with Slackware and Red Hat on CD's. The fourth edition is supposedly Red Hat oriented, and comes with Red Hat 5.1, and Caldera OpenLinux Lite 1.2, on CD's, as well as a CD with source code for the Red Hat distribution. However, the fourth edition does not come with Slackware. But, for some strange reason, the command explanations, eg, adduser, relate only to the Slackware distribution, and are completely different to the Red Hat distribution. The installation instructions for the Red Hat distribution are poorly written, and miss too much material, skipping over important material. The information is somewhat inaccurate, and this is only discovered when it is too late. On page 33 of the book, it states "For a complete installation of everything in the distribution, 150MB to 200MB is recommended." However, after having repartioned my hard disk with a partition for Linux of 625MB, so I could install Red Hat Linux and Star Office, with lots of room left to spare, when I was installing Red Hat Linux 5.1, from the CD, with all the packages, I found that it required 657 MB. I ended up re-installing, without many of the packages, and cutting the installation to supposedly 500MB, according to the installation information displayed during installation, to leave room for the Star Office installation. But, it took 525 MB of disk space, when the reduced installation copmpleted, so I can't install Star Office, without scrapping the system, and re-partioning the hard-drive again. Also, no explanation is given as to why the df figures displayed don't add up, and why they disagree with the fdisk figures, for free space and usage. The figures mentioned, apart from the 625MB partion, do not include the 35MB swap partition. This is all quite unfortunate, as the QUE Special Edition books have thus far had a good reputation, which this book appears to degrade. It is unfortunate that no-one appeared to really read the book, or check its validity or relevance, before unleashing it on an unsuspecting public. Perhaps Que should hire some proof-readers, and technical advisers, to go through books such as this, before unleashing them on the public. Thus, the future books (and reprints, if any), could be more accurate and reliable.
Rating:
Summary: Great technical reference, But
Review: I purchased this book per a recommendation and was extremely excited, after reading the cursory synopsis of the book. Upon receipt of the book I first looked at the CD's and found no mention of the Slackware Distribution, Only Redhat's and Caldera's, along with the Star Office. Now perhaps the Slackware distribution is included somewhere on the CD's but it is not immediately evident and will undoubtably lead to confusion. My initial foray into the contents started well, and I was pleased with the explanations of Linux, it history and use. Unfortunately, this is stopping point for, in my estimation, any attempt by the authors at making the subject matter the least bit interesting. It is in the 2nd chapter that the subject matter, while extremely important and manditory reading, as it is dealing with the set up and installation process, becomes painfully dry, an effort to read and definately not for the beginner or casual user. In the 3rd chapter much of the second chapter dealing with set up and installation is repeated verbatum, and again is technically difficult to read. At this point I should say that while not a total computer techniphobe, I do have 10 years of experience with computers, beginning in the days of DOS and continuing into the Windows amd Macintosh families of operating systems. I also over the years have accumulated a certain degree of experience with both hardware and software so I am what I would consider a fairly advanced computer user. I am currently starting into the 4th chapter and will attempt to get some understanding of the Linux OS. I would not however recommend this book to anyone just starting out with Linux, but would only recommend it to those whom already have linux up and running and require a reference book to fall back on. Great for the advanced user , but not for the beginner on thier initiation into Linux. I myself will probably purchase a much more user friendly reference to begin my experience with Linux.
Rating:
Summary: LIZARD install process is the best
Review: I read the book and installed and tested OpenLinux 2.2. The book is well written and does a good job of covering the OS. Caldra's OpenLinux 2.2 is an average distribution, but the LIZARD installation process is the best I have seen. The other Linux guys would do well to copy this technique. So far, I believe that Linux-Mandrake 6.0 offers the best release.
Rating:
Summary: Correction
Review: I unfortunately incorrectly noted the the duplication of text involving the setup and installation of Linux as chapters 2 & 3. This is incorrect the offending chapters are 3 & 4. I was and am continuing into chapter 5. My apologies to anyone this may have confused. However the remainder of my review stands as stated.
Rating:
Summary: good book, but lacking
Review: I'm a 13 year-old kid in Tennesse exploring the world of UNIX/Linux. I picked up this book because of the 3 CD-ROMs, RedHat, Slackware and Caldera. The book is preety good, but could use more in Xwindows installation/useage chapters. The distributions are getting old, if you buy the book, go out and buy Redhat 5.0, I'm running Debian Linux I got from boot Magizine issue 15
|
