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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Great help for a difficult Linux Distribution, July 16, 1999
By A Customer
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.
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