I need a Linux book

I think I may start to get annoying if I don't get a book on Linux to reference off of. What book would be good for beginners?

I found 2 on amazon that sound good:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0764543334/qid=1082415287/sr=1-2/ref=sr_1_2/102-3339319-5292944?v=glance&s=books
Red Hat Linux Bible: Fedora and Enterprise Edition

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0764539388/qid=1082415287/sr=1-4/ref=sr_1_4/102-3339319-5292944?v=glance&s=books
Red Hat Linux 9 Bible

I have also found some Linux for Dummies books, but I don't know how good those are.

 

Jim, what's up?
Thought I'd link you to my favorite one (which also has a link to two sample chapters you can download in pdf format):

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/runux4/index.html
Some people say its the best out now.
I also have high hopes for this book:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/A...2431393/sr=2-1/ref=sr_2_1/104-9735327-3383931

I read another one this guy wrote that was titled Linux PowerTools

 

Those online books are nice. I also wanted a hard copy to read while I'm at some acedemic competition at state in a couple days, so I bought the Running Linux book. While I was at the book store the tornado sirens went off and I was stuck there for a little while, but it was worth it . anyway, thanks for the help!

 

Good pointers guys thanks. Pretty hard to break this Linux eh, .....and I've tried, believe me I've tried

 

Hehe. Something isn't it? Sometimes I open up a whole bunch of applications "just for fun", (at the same time).
I throw everything I got at it, it doesn't budge!

g1lgam3sh,
isn't that the little Gentoo Penquin in your avatar? Have you compiled the Gentoo stuff? I have heard of it, but haven't looked hard at it yet.

 

Hi Robster


Didn't know it was the Gentoo penguin, I'm not ready for compliling that .....yet. Next step is we've just acquired a Dell server for the office and I'm seriously considering running Linux with Wine or something like.

Just looking around at the moment for the best Distro to do that with, any suggestions?

 

Gee g1lgm3sh,
I don't know, yet. I have not done any kind of server set up or anything.
For all I know, I would use Debian woody. This site here is run w/ some release of Debian.
Vlad uses OpenBSD, I think.

Anyway, did you see this link on the Linux Compatible site?

http://docs.linux.com/article.pl?sid=04/04/15/1913248

I know Fedora has all that server stuff on there. What kind of server were you going to have? httpd, ftpd, pop3d, ....?

Let us know of the adventures!

 

It's not very complicated, mot daemons are very simple to set-up, the most problems I have ever had are updating things like updating SSH remotely which involves screwing with the router remotely with lynx which is not fun, but is usually not very hard. Also the change of Apache conf file format between Linux and FreeBSD was a bit of a pain.

Linux for testing, FreeBSD as a desktop (and server), Windows 2000 since I'm doing some research into Windows now a days and for CS, I used to run OpenBSD as a desktop, and I know alot of people that do but now a days I just use OpenBSD for router stuff. I run alot of OSes =)

If so you might want to post which you are going to run, so you don't end up running wu-ftpd *cough* Red Hat has a bit of a bad history with wu-ftpd.

What applications do you need Wine for? If it's few that are windows specifics that's sensible but if it's alot you're better off going with a win2k or win2k3 box.

 

rob, it all depends on your system, i have crashed (read as froze permanently) kde more than once by running to many apps on this peice of junk

 

Very true. That kde crashes FAR more often than gnome, for me.
I'm curious, and I'm sure I'll run across it...
I open up the KDE System Guard (ksysguard, if you will), to look like CPU usage and memory usage (because it looks so cool).
I run a distributive computation program. After say 24 hours of uptime, I see where more memory is used, even into the swap space. I have 512MB physical mem. It doesn't even use half of it at first.
I am just curious. Is the memory used up by things like syslog entries?
I'm sure this is a general computer type of question. No biggie, just what's got my attention right now, other than trying to network a laptop to the desktop. I may have to resort to using PPP with RS-232 or a parallel or USB cable. I don't know if my NIC's are compatible, yet.

There's no end to this stuff, is there??? LOL

 

I'm not sure I understand what you were saying, are you saying you have less and less memory as time goes on? If this is what you said the reason is because some programs don't free memory allocated memory like they should, so even after program termination this memory is still used, don't worry though, if you run low on RAM 'init' (or is it 'swapper'? God I forget) will deallocate this memory for you. The process used to do it every 10 seconds but this a better solution.


And FYI the syslog entries should not matter as syslog is not mapped to memory permanantly.

 

That's it, Vlad, so-called "memory leaks?". Ha Ha. the books
I'm reading still talk about the bdflush. Its in the man pages, still.
I wonder about things, or hear about things, and when I finally come around to reading about them finally, I get that sense of
"Linux Enlightenment". The perfect hobby!

 

I know what you're saying and Win2k3 is my other route. I'm thinking of hosting our own web server and mail server separate from MIS in Chicago. At this stage it's still speculation although one of those solutions will be chosen.

 

Robster12: Yes, generally memory leaks occur in C programs due to their dynamic memory allocation.

g1lgam3sh: If it's just web server and mail server and you're going to run it on a *nix box I'd go with Apache plus postfix.