Customer Reviews

Everyday Linux

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Review
Once you've installed Linux and you're looking at the windowing system desktop, you may be wondering what you can do that relates to practical work, like writing a memo, creating a spreadsheet, or developing a presentation. You may even be wondering where the games are. If you can't find those tools yourself, this book can help you out.

The first half of the book deals with the installation and system maintenance aspect of running Linux. It's rather dated, in that it is based on the Red Hat 6.2 distribution. Since 8.0 and 9.0 are now common, you may not want to trust this data too much. There are a few good chapters on file management and command line utilities, so it's not a total loss.

The second half of the book starts discussing the different productivity applications that come with the Red Hat distribution. The StarOffice suite is a replacement for Microsoft's Office suite. To a large degree, the two applications can read files produced by each other. And given that the price is free, it's a very good deal. You'll find that OpenOffice is now a very common open source productivity suite, so you may find that StarOffice isn't as relevant as it was a couple of years ago. The other chapters on applications can help you find the tools you use on a regular basis in the Microsoft Windows world. Since each chapter is limited due to space, you will probably rely more on the software's help files to assist you in learning more about each package you choose to use. Everyday Linux can help you get there, but it probably won't take you as far as you'd like to go.

Conclusion
This book may be a little too dated to be of practical use now. The Red Hat distribution is far past 6.2, and the bundled applications have also advanced or been replaced with other applications. Still, it is one of the few books that does try to cover a number of the Linux desktop applications.