Every Flavour Beans

The Wiley book, Linux Bible – 2007 Edition, by Christopher Negus, the author of popular book Red Hat Linux Bible, got at least one thing right: it gives the reader an option to select one of many GNU/Linux distributions available today according to his or her requirements/taste. The necessity of sticking to a distribution just because it happened to come with the a “Red Hat Linux Bible,” “Debian GNU/Linux Bible,” “The Official Ubuntu Book”, “Linux Made Easy” and plenty of other such GNU/Linux books that the user happened to buy in search of a ‘linux book’ is present no more. This book covers the installations of over a dozen GNU/Linux distributions and includes all of those distributions on the DVD & CD that come with the book. The distributions covered by the book include:

1. Fedora Core
2. Debian GNU/Linux
3. openSUSE Linux
4. KNOPPIX
5. Yellow Dog Linux
6. Gentoo Linux
7. Slackware Linux
8. Freespire
9. Mandriva Linux
10. Ubuntu Linux
11. Coyote Linux Firewall

I am particularly happy with the inclusion of Slackware and Gentoo Linux.

The book also points out small yet useful distributions like Puppy Linux, Damn Small Linux, BackTrack Suite, System Rescue CD, MoviX, GeeXboX, KnoppMyth(TV), Dyne:boli(multimedia)c and more.

The book comes with a DVD and a CD-ROM, details of the contents of which are provided in an appendix in the book. The DVD that comes with the book contains the following distributions/images.

• Fedora Core 6(installs directly from the DVD)
• Slackware 11(installs directly from the DVD)
• Live CDs of KNOPPIX 5.0.1 and BackTrack (boots directly from the DVD)
• Ubuntu 6.10(boots directly from the DVD)
• Gentoo Linux((boots directly from the DVD)
• Mandriva One 2007(boots directly from the DVD)
• Freespire 1.0.13 ISO image

The CD contains the following distributions:

• Live CDs of Damn Small Linux, INSERT, SLAX, System Rescue CD, Puppy Linux and Coyote Linux.
• Minimal install CDs of Debian, SUSE and Gentoo. Need a working Internet connection to complete the installation.

All of these can be booted right from the CD-ROM.

The book covers much more than just how to install or run the above mentioned distributions of course. The first two parts provide a general introduction to all aspects of GNU/Linux operating system – shell commands, GUI desktop, basic administration, Internet, and security.

The penultimate two parts discuss audio and video playback, word processors and image manipulators, email and web clients, gaming(could’ve been avoided), server software like web(Apache), database(MySQL), PHP, EMail(Exim), Print(CUPS) and File(NFS and Samba) servers.

The last part contains two chapters on programming under GNU/Linux.

More information on the product website and Amazon.