Re: [tlug] State of "Linux" documentation [was: Books]

[Scott Robbins <scottro@example.com>]

On Sat, Jun 07, 2008 at 05:19:05PM +0900, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> Scott Robbins writes:
> 
>  > Well, one problem is that a book on say, RedHat, isn't going to help
>  > that much with Ubuntu. 
> 
> You're kidding, I hope.  If that's really true, how sad.

Hrrm, let me reconsider my statement.   
Well, both books will probably spend a great deal of time on working
with Gnome, the default desktop for both.  Ok, that will be applicable
to both. 

However, an RHCE friend of mine tells me that RH is quite proud of its
GUI config tools for servers, so the chapter on using those won't help
with Ubuntu.  

The chapter on using yum or its GUI frontend won't help. 
The chapter on the various files, which will probably only get brief
treatment, probably won't help, because they have different text config
files in many cases.  I know from browsing the Ubuntu forums, for
instance, that the network config files are not in
/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts.   (My own preference is the BSD method,
but of course, that can be prejudice. )  The chkconfig section won't
help with Ubuntu (AFAIK.)

An in depth chapter on /etc/init.d should be useful for both.  (However,
books these days tend to ignore such frightening things.)  

The GUI installation chapter, or even the text based one probably won't
help.   The IPTables chapter will be useful, but it will again probably
focus on the GUI method--I don't know which either one uses, though with
RH, when doing it by hand, you're starting with the RedHat-1 chain.  

So, to reconsider my statement, I would say I'm about 30-70 percent
correct--probably less so if the book focuses on the GUI. 


It's probably more difficult to switch from an RH based distro (e.g.,
Fedora) to a Debian based one (e.g., Ubuntu) than it is to switch from
one BSD to another.  

I'm prejudiced towards the BSDs so that statement is no doubt, partially
guided by that prejudice.


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Scott Robbins
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