Customer Reviews

Red Hat Fedora Linux 3 Bible

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Negus' series of Red Hat/Fedora Bibles are, in my humble opinion, the best and possibly only place to start ***for an outstanding overview of what Linux can do.*** You may need specialized books to flesh out a specific need: an apache book, a sendmail book, mySQL, whatever. Then again, there's a good chance you won't unless you want to do something tricky. Negus walks you through, step by step, how to configure Red Hat/Fedora for pretty much anything it's capable of doing, albeit a ***basic*** configuration.

Advice for beginners. If you are a Microsoft user, stay a Microsoft user unless you have a compelling reason to change (money and stability are usually the two best reasons to change - and stability is debatable with XP), are comfortable with computers, are willing to read your butt off, and don't need specific applications that are only written for Microsoft. Always remember: ***in general***, computers do not make money. They just don't. They ***usually*** just make doing whatever it is you do to make money easier, i.e., they save time. If you want to learn, this is a great book with which to start.

This enormous book is nothing short of excellent!

You get the four CD's of Fedora Core 2 included.

The book is full of succinct explanations of how to do a huge number of basic and not so basic tasks in configuring Fedora. The explanantions are logical, ordered and actually work really well. In addition there are tips and windows how-tos for connecting windows to various Fedora provided services such as file servers, print servers and so on.

I am really impressed with this book because it just what the average tinkering user wishing to escape the grip of Microsoft needs to get underway and free from closed source, proprietary OS's that cost jumbo dollars...for $35 you get a really robust, excellent OS (I run it on 2 computers: 1 file/print/database server and 1 desktop) that is fun to play around with and explore as well as 1100 pages of explanations on how to do most of things you'll probably ever need to do (some linux documentation can be obscure and not overly useful if you have to wade thru masses and masses of HTML pages looking for an explanation). It's not guru depth stuff for the most part, but puts you well and truly on the correct path to guru-ness if you wanna go that way. or alternatively, is a just plain excellent if you wanna enjoy a life free of Microsoft (it's a good feeling...!) I have both this and running Linux, O'Reilly (isbn 0596002726), and personally I think this is significantly better value because of its clear content, breadth and depth, clarity in explaining how to do things and you get the OS with it!

So come on...buy it, try it, take control of your PC away from Microsoft and put it back into your hands. Christopher Negus has a lot to tell us and teach us...

This book assumes nothing about your prowess or familiarity with PC's. If you can read and follow 10 step procedures, then you're in business. Sure, there are some pages on linux games, the desktop,publishing and multimedia and such that I consider a bit obvious, but they still cater for the total newbie I guess. So they can't be bad...but the remainer is all good stuff: particularly the 200-400 page sections on administering fedora, network and server set up. Masterful!

Overall: an excellent book that is well written, clear, concise, intertesting and a gateway to opening up your vision to a truly fine OS: Fedora. It's even funny at times, in a dry sort of way.

Previous version was a 2003 Best Linux Book as voted by readers of Linux World Magazine (so it says on the front)...

I find it strange to say that an eleven hundred page (plus) book is really only an introductory book. Unfortunately that's the truth. What you get here is a bunch of stuff. For one thing, you get the operating system itself. And while you can download the coftware free, you'd better be prepared for a pretty long wait, at 56K about a hundred hours for the four 650 MB image disks.

I say "introductory" because there are so many subsidiary packages included in the basic Linux distribution and these can be treated only superficially. For instance MySQL gets about 35 pages. This is enough to get the software up and running, and a little bit about the SQL language. But you're not going to be a power SQL programmer after just 35 pages, you've only touched the surface. And of course each other big area (Apache Web Server, Mail Server, LDAP and a whole lot of other sets of initials) has it's own set of books to expand on what's here.

But you've got to start somewhere, and here's a good place. Mr. Negus is a far better writer than many in the computer business. He's written this as a way to get started in moving to the Linux world. And at this he does a supurb job.

The book is good. It is well written and easy to follow. Using this book I was able to reclaim a partition on my laptop. I then reformatted the partition and installed fedora core 3 on my laptop with the dvd that came with the book. Every thing is working fine except my wireless card which does not seem to have a driver. But I followed the instruction in the book on how to obtain the driver and get it worked but I have not done it yet. Overall, the information in the book was very helpful and I do recommend the book.

I like the book as well as most of his other Linux books. Its very detailed and does not assume you are a guru. At the same time he does not talk down to the reader.
I would recommend to anyone building a system with Fedora Linux and needs to tweek it to there own requirements.

Kudos to Mr. Negus for another great book! I have his book on RH7.2 and thought that it was a great. When I decided to move to Fedora this was the book I thought would be best. Another great guide to the OS.

My only issue with it, and most of Linux disto books, is the focus on installation and initial configuration. I wish they would include more content on actually using the system. Give me more on applications and tools. In his credit though, the author does far better than most in this area. There is actually some good stuff on what is packaged with FC2 and some suggestions for other applications.

Just a word about FC2. Out of the box there is little support for playing MP3 files. Mr. Negus does point you in the right direction to download the codecs but you will have to get them before you can play anything in this format. If this is something that you are interested in doing check out the chapters on multimedia. Same is true with DVDs but I haven't worked with those yet.

Great book, especially if you have never used Linux before. It will get you started but you will have to look elsewhere to move past the basics.

<jav>

When software doesn't work in Linux, everyone (who cares to) can see the code, debug the problem, and help get it fixed. A reviewer of this book described how a particular Fedora 2 install failed. Following up on how the problem was fixed illustrates the open source software model at its best.

The bug the reviewer encountered was reported to Red Hat by others at bugzilla.redhat.com too late to make the final Fedora 2 release. Nearly 200 comments were entered on the bug, allowing a developer at Red Hat to provide a quick fix. (Search there for bug 121819 and see comment 122, if you have the same problem.) After Fedora is installed, the permanent fix is available to be downloaded with a single command (yum update kernel).

Once you get past the installation (as most will without trouble), you'll see that this most recent version of the Red Hat Linux Bible (Fedora 2) reflects the latest features available today for Linux. Red Hat wasn't kidding when it said it wanted to do rapid development of cutting-edge Linux technology. Fedora Core 2 includes:

* The latest Linux 2.6 kernel
* New desktop (X.org server, KDE, and GNOME)
* ALSA sound system
* New Security Enhanced Linux
* Many other new features

Fedora Core 2 will run faster as a desktop and more securely as a server. If you want an edge learning the latest features slated for Red Hat's enterprise Linux products, this book includes the complete Fedora Core 2 distribution on four CDs and detailed instructions on how to use it as a desktop or server system.

-- Chris Negus
Author, Red Hat Fedora Linux 2 Bible

It is a good book and it really helped me a lot with my intro to linux