Customer Reviews

The Debian Linux User's Guide

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This book comes with version 2.1 of Debian GNU/Linux. I first encountered Debian GNU/Linux back in 1996. The version back then had a static kernel with drivers for almost every SCSI and Ethernet device known to Linux. When I attempted to install it, my system promptly froze while it was detecting hardware. So I was happy for the opportunity to revisit Debian GNU/Linux with the help of this book. This time, I took a different tact, pretending no prior knowledge and letting the book "hold me by the hand". And let me tell you, it helped me a lot. For example, Dselect is not easy to figure out but, by taking one through finding Midnight Commander (a good package, by the way) and adding it to the install, it showed me how to navigate through Dselect. I now feel more confident in performing a "custom" install, using Dselect.

Also, I have been using Linux since late 1994 (my first distribution was Iggdrasil's "Plug and play Linux") and until now, I have never compiled a kernal. I have come close in the past but a new release coming out that supported my custom hardware (i.e. sound) always kept me from following through. But this book took me through, step by step, configuring and compiling the kernel, making the process, if not easy, at least quite approachable.

Interestingly, the discussion in the book on swap files helped me to debug a persistent Windows 98 problem where, after Windows 98 was up more than a few hours, it would slow down to a crawl with the disk drive running at full speed. What I found was that the way Windows 98 defined the swap file was not helping me at all. I changed it from a dynamic to a static swap file, using almost double the RAM size and Windows 98 is running almost respectably.

Getting back to the packaging systems, I feel quite comfortable with "dpkg", based on the description in this book. It is not too far off from "rpm", which I have used quite a bit, from my prior experience with Red Hat Linux.

If there is a section that could be stronger, it is the X11 Installation section. A run down of the configuration tools available (XF86Config, Xconfigurator, etc) would be helpful. However, the description of the Window Managers is very good, in addition to the description of why you need to install multiple font packages and why it is better, at first, to not make xdm come up at boot time.

In all, this has been a very helpful book and has made Debian Linux a good choice for my future Linux installations.

If this is the first time you encounter Linux then maybe you'll find some useful information in it, but even in that case I wouldn't offer you just that book. On the other hand, if you are not an absolutely beginner Linux user I hardly can imagine you'll see any use of it. 261 pages covering 10-page information. Doesn't worth it.

Of course it is specific to Debian. Have a look at the title.

This book is specific to the Debian GNU/Linux v2 distribution and would probably not be useful for people using/installing other distributions of Linux. It is very specific and good about the early stages of the installation process. But, you need to be somewhat knowledgeable about the command prompt to use this book. Also some interpretation of the info here is necessary. For example there is a chapter on dpkg, the underlying installation program, but it is very superficial and is no help if you get into trouble. This book is fairly good as far as it goes. Release version 2.0 has 3 CDs and version 2.1 has 4 CDs. This package includes 30 days of email support from the book publisher, Linux Press.

I have gotten this book and let me tell you, this book is not easy to follow. Plus, their outline of dselect is not very good. The book is over-priced and too small. I was better off with a distribution that came with a eight dollar magazine and it's 12 step installation. I even got it to function properly. After using this book and it's software, I ended up with way less than I wanted. Also, after running through the installation using this book, I ended up not being able to use windows because the lilo (Linux Loader, the boot-loader installed with linux) configuration file was extremely messed up with no option to load windows. The only example of "multiple os installation" is with loadlin (dos-based boot-loader) and not lilo.