The Complete Idiot's Guide to Linux (2nd Edition)

Rating:
Summary: A bit more information and it would have been the best...
Review: Great book. It takes you through installation, customization and some troubleshooting, and it even manages to explain kernel recompilation in a simple way! If your computer is a simple, bare bones workstation, great. If it's not (and you know it's not) then the book is still great, but not quite complete: a lot of people out there own soundcards, scanners, joysticks and gamepads, and the book says little or nothing about those relevant pieces of hardware. So, it gets 4 stars.

Rating:
Summary: A good book for an interested Linux beginner.
Review: I have read this book and found it to be useful in getting started with the included version of Linux, Caldera Open Linux 1.3. It includes an office productivity suite (StarOffice 4.0) in the software packages.

If you are thinking of trying Linux then I would suggest that this book, with its included software, is perhaps the cheapest way to sample this alternate operating system on your computer. I installed it on an 'Japan only model' IBM 230Cs laptop with a DX/2 50 MHz CPU and 20 MB of RAM. It worked fine! Think how it would be with a Pentium chip and 64 MB of RAM! The KDE window manager system is excellent and will appeal to novice and experienced Linux users alike.

Give it a try! You might find that you enjoy using a stable, powerful operating system that makes the most of new and older computers.

Rating:
Summary: EXCELLENT book for the beginner!
Review: I have several books on UNIX/Linux, but this is the one that helped me get up to speed! With the other books I got stuck several times, but this book is very easy to understand, and gives you all the necessary information to get started. If you are totally new to UNIX/Linux this book is a good place to start!

Rating:
Summary: Common sense is required for all things...
Review: If you know nothing about Linux, little about computers and want info on the caldera distribution then this book is an okay starter. But it will not give you enough details to be the source you rely on when running/installing Linux. Not quite three months after purchasing, my copy of the Idiot's Guide looks brand new while my O'Reilly Linux books are painfully dog-eared.

Rating:
Summary: Great Linux book for beginners
Review: May I congratulate the author on an excellent book. I bought the book 4 days ago. I haven't had so much fun/enjoyment with a book and its acccompanying CD before. The X Windows KDE graphical interace and the explanations are both excellent. A great beginners book and very good value for money.

It is possible to sit down at your PC and have a Linux system with a Windows graphical interface in a few hours. The author's explanations are concise and the book's graphics are most helpful. The book covers both Linux in a Graphical Environment and working at the command line. A great introduction for a computer user looking for an alternative to Microsoft Windows or looking to find out about Linux.

Rating:
Summary: Common sense is required for all things...
Review: Ok, If you are a windoze user and you want to upgrade to Linux, START here. Buy a copy of Red Hat 6.2, this book, and a more advanced book, like Learning Red Hat Visually (Includes a copy of Red Hat 6.2).

Read the idiots guide so you can start to4 move around and THEN use the Visual book that will show you screen shots of what you need to do for more advanced use. When you've mastered the visual book, get a book on hard core programming.

You will not find one book for newbies and old pro's. Stop looking for one. I started with the Visual book, big mistake. I got stuck and droped it for a few months. Do things in order and be patient. You won't learn how to edit your x11 files overnight, but if you can't seem to get your screen out of 648x480 at 60Hz eventually you will need to look there...Today, however, learn what PDW and LS really do before you start playing.

Rating:
Summary: Useful Tool
Review: This introduction to Linux and Caldera edition was very useful as I began to learn about Linux and experiment with it on my computer. It is a useful tool and answers questions regarding installation.

Rating:
Summary: Great for beginners, too shallow for others
Review: Way into late nineties, most books on Linux still read like this: Here is Linux, which is zillion times better than MS-DOS, and here is the command shell, which is so much more powerful than COMMAND.COM in MS-DOS, then here are X Windows, which are like MS Windows in DOS, only better... A reader less acquainted with the history of computing might have asked "Wow, that's cool, but what is this MS-DOS thing you keep mentioning?"

When the first edition of this book appeared in late 1998, Manuel Alberto Ricart was among the first authors to admit that Windows 95 and 98 actually *did* happen. Rather than comparing bare-bones Linux with a historic relic, he chose a decent peer for a modern Windows environment: Linux with a desktop environment KDE.

Mr. Ricart starts with the elements of the KDE desktop, spends considerable time explaining basic operations with it, then proceeds to the programs of KDE base suite: file manager, text editor etc. The inevitable command line only comes in in part two. After explaining the basic commands -- file utilities -- some Unix concepts like pipes and regular expressions are discussed, while the programming in command shell is omitted. The section on programming editors Vi and Emacs is probably too short to be useful. The last part, part three, deals with the system administration tasks. Installation of Linux is added as an appendix.

What is the advantage of using command shell despite the existance of graphical interface? Mr. Ricart unfortunately cannot give a convincing answer, although it is probably clear to every second reader -- command shell contains a powerful macro language, which is superb for performing repetitive tasks. This is a pity -- spending 30-40 more pages on the Bash programming would actually give a meaning for including the complete Part 2. But I guess there has to be something idiotic in each of the books of Complete Idiot's series, right?

Leaving this aside, the book is perhaps the best introduction to Linux for beginners. Of all the distributions, Caldera Open Linux that comes with the book allegedly has the most user-friendly installation program -- unless you have some unfortunate exotic hardware, with which it won't work. Bear in mind though that every Linux CD included in a book is likely to be one year old or more when it arrives in your hands, and one year is a long time in Linux development. So the system you have just installed is already outdated... Watch the Web to find out what is really going on.

Rating:
Summary: Great newbie guide to Linux/Unix variants/Unix like OSes
Review: XFree86 version 3.3.4 (free Open Source version of X Window System version 11) that came on the cd for some odd reason didn't work on my computer with a Sis 5597/5598 using either Lizard or LISA and kept freezing it. The book's first chapter does a very good job of describing the process of inventorying hardware, checking hardware compatibility, repartitioning your hard drive using Fips, if necessary, explaining the difference between primary, extended, and logical partitions, taking you step by step through a Lizard install with plenty of pictures, and explaining what happens at each stage of the install process. The second chapter introduces you to the KDE desktop. The appendix at the end of the books shows you how to install using LISA (text based installer), though if you want to try LISA make sure to go to Caldera's hardware compatibility list at www.caldera.com/support/hardware/2.3/. If you choose to install that way all modules for hardware must be loaded manually and it may be a long process, you've been warned. Unfortunately sometimes hardware compatibility issues may pop up with Lizard so it's good to know how to do it just in case Lizard doesn't work. I haven't finished this book yet, but it's very interesting and in my opinion worth the read. Overall a good book and the cheapest I was able to find. Be wary of the fact that OpenLinux 2.3 may not work with the latest hardware. Other than that your install should go quite smoothly and I'd say the older the hardware you use the better the chances of your being successful (I'd recommend a Pentium 233 with MMX or PII 300 or equivalent or earlier). Please note that my review only applies to the Second Edition of this book (not the First Edition).