Customer Reviews

Linux Toys: 13 Cool Projects for Home, Office and Entertainment

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

 

 

Always looking for a something cool to tinker with, I found my perfect match in Linux Toys.

My first project this past weekend was to jump to chapter 10 and build the "Digital Receptionist." Using an unused PC (PII 300, 4GB, 128MB) and an old modem I was able to build the project, and I now get my phone messages from home answered by the machine and emailed to me at work - how cool is that?

There are 12 more projects in the book, and I will probably do the digital video recorder next.

I am not a complete Linux newbie - I have a RH 9 box on my home network, but I am no expert either. However, this is Chris Negus, the same guy that writes the Red Hat Linux Bible (great way to get the CD distro) so I found it very easy to read, and not at all intimidating.

If you have an old PC in the closet, or just like to play with Linux, get this book - it's a blast.

When I first read this book, I thought," This is nothing more than a collection of Stuff he pulled off the web." After going thru it a second time I realised that I never would have thought of most of these projects. If I had thought of them, I would have spent tens of hours serching the web trying to figure out how to do them and downloading te software needed.

If you like to tinker with computers, buy this book. All of the projects are well documented and the included cd has most of the software that is mentioned in the book.

I'm glad I bought it.

I met Chris Negus at a User Group conference in April where he was talking about Linux Toys. I just got this book last week and spent the weekend trying out some of the projects. They are really fun and challenging. If you like to play around with Linux in your spare time or use it regularly, you will really enjoy Chris' book.

I wish I'd found this book at a retail store where I could have looked at it before I payed for it. I guess I have two complaints with this book.

The first (bigger) complaint stems from that adage that if you give a guy a fish, he can eat for a day, but if you teach him to fish, he can eat for the rest of his life. I really hoped this book would be more of a how-to approach on how to get the software going. Instead, it came with a CD with an RPM for every project and simple instructions. Most of the projects seemed like nothing more than: "Start with an Athlon 1.8GHz with a half gig of RAM and a big hard drive, install the entire linux distribution of your choice, then run the RPM on the CD in the book. You're done! Now go play!" I was really hoping to see more explanation of what was going on in the guts of the software, and a more minimalist approach to the software and hardware requirements. I can find anything I want on the internet for "build this kernel, re-compile those binaries, and edit the files in /etc to make it work". More often than not, though, most of the stuff on the internet is beyond what most folks that have been using windows all along and are trying to make sense of the internals of Linux are capable of understanding. Unfortunately, this text makes a poor stepping-stone for the newbie to get a good start on learning HOW LINUX WORKS.

My other issue goes back to what I mentioned in the previous paragraph about what I felt were frequently over-the-top hardware requirements. I'd hoped I'd be able to employ my old Pentium III with a 12-GB disk and 256 MB of RAM for some of the projects. Unfortunately, most of the projects were calling for a brand-new machine. For instance, if I recall correctly, the video recorder project asked for hardware that would probably end up costing in excess of $800. Are you kidding me? I'll just keep using my VCR, thus saving me the cost of having to buy a TiVo and pay for the monthly service.

Anyone interested in buying my book? Send me an email.

Impressive collection of projects and information. So far I've only read part of it but I've already learned a lot. Even the Appendices are packed with info - "Appendix B - ABCs of Using Linux" has one of the best intros to Linux I've seen so far anywhere.

There's something for every curious Linux learner in this book.

So much good quality information, so little time.

Well, I am really serious about linux. My career is lowering TCO for small to medium businesses by rolling their M$ servers over to *nix solutions. (Yeah people actually do it... and it's becoming more and more frequent.)

I gave this book 5 stars because:
1) it's remarkably creative
2) it's easy to read
3) FUN and FREEDOM are the backbones of linux, and I think this book will help spread that message.

(It's better then complaining about the book being written for the lowest common denominator, RedHat. I'm a SuSe/Gentoo user BTW.)

Reading this book took me to a place that very clearly reminded me why I prefer linux over M$. FREEDOM to play without rediculous licensing or expensive Hardware.

The book is an easy read (I knocked it out in an evening.) but still worth the 30+ bucks I spent on it. As far as doing the projects?? The picture frame looks like too much fun to passup... I'm searching online for an old laptop tonight... heheh :)

Having just obtained two other books by author Christopher Negus ("Live Linux CDs" and "The Official Damn Small Linux Book") and thoroughly enjoying them as well as learning a lot, I decided to take a look at his earlier works "Linux Toys" and "Linux Toys II".

It is really surprising just how antiquated a book published in 2003 can appear to be after only six years. Even the author on his Linux Toys website acknowledges this is so.

First, the Red Hat Linux distribution relied upon is gone forever, replaced by the Fedora Project distro which may or may not work with the programs included on the books' CD. Thus, many of the projects contained in the book might not be possible without excessive time and labor on just getting things to run.

Next, even if you got the software to work, there's not a lot to learn. Each of the projects is pretty trivial and all the programs, scripts and such are supplied. Basically getting then to run was a matter of following instructions. Next some of the projects were trivial, such as making a digital receptionist to record phone messages, a device for controlling radio-controlled car. (The relay card required for the project is no longer available and even at the time of writing cost quite a bit.)

There is a short overview as an Appendix on using Red Hat Linux. But the projects are beyond the capabilities of most beginners, so the overview wasn't very useful. Overall, this was not really a book oriented toward teaching beginners how to use Linux.

In sum, this is a book that may have been helpful at expanding person's use and practical knowledge of Red Hat Linux in 2003. It is of very little value today.

Jerry

First I was a little disapointed in it's Red Hat slant. I'm more of a Debian fan so I was kindof bummed that all the code was in rpm format. After downloading Alian and converting the rpms to debs I then installed the code and had to go through and fix up a lot of stuff. (because they put things in different places)

The book itself is pretty useless, I was hoping for more of a description of how to get certain things done. Mainly I was hoping for a description of how to create a read only filesystem so you don't have to worry about system checks on startup but the author doesn't cover this at all.

Overall there are some pretty neat ideas but I was disapointed that it all revolves around Red Hat and the author doesn't talk about making them work on other systems. He also doesn't talk about how the scripts work, just how to install them (rpm -i...) I thought the book was a bit simple and should have been called "Red Hat Toys"

OK. I bought the book, Linux Toys, for one reason and one reason only: Chapter 15 - Digital Picture Frame. There is just not enough info in the book for neophites such as myself. The website: www/linuxtoys.com does not help either.

When I frst saw this book into the store shelf I thought finally a great book about linux projects! Well... it didn't take much time to get back on my feet when I started reading it. I'm not saying it's a ripoff but it's to basic. I haven't learned much when what I
wanted more exactly was to learn much about cool stuff you can do with linux. And also the fact that it is complimentary to R.H. 9 makes it awkward because the point is to run the projects on old computers it would of make much more sense to pack in a small and fast distro that can run better on old computers than Red hat. Finally, don't hope to much about this book except from making your imagination work towards better project than they did. I would not consider every 13 projects in this book "projects", most of them are not projects they just packed them in to make more content! Enough said, don't wasted your money on this if you are at least the intermidiate linux user. Else look other much cooler stuff on the web or mayby some other book. But for the real newbie, it may be a good start... maby