A Practical Guide to Red Hat Linux: Fedora Core and Red Hat Enterprise Linux by Mark G. Sobell

Michael J. Jordan, Linux Online Staff

September 9, 2004

Mark Sobell's latest book: A Practical Guide to Red Hat Linux comes in at over 1000 pages, but there's no wasted space here. Every page will teach you something.

The book starts with a good overview of Linux. In this Microsoft dominated world, there are still quite a few people who could benefit from learning just what Linux is and why using it could be advantageous to their organization. Chapters 2 and 3 combine to give you a good, in-depth explanation of installing Fedora Core 2, Red Hat's latest free Linux offering. The book then gives an overview of using Fedora with tools sporting graphical user interfaces. The truth is that there are enough administration tools with GUIs that you don't even have to type anything anymore, but if you want to know how to use the command line effectively (and it's always been my opinion that this is a good idea), chapter 5 will give you an excellent introduction to using Linux command line utilities. This chapter ends with a brief tutorial on vim, the most widely-used command line editor for Linux and a must for all budding Linux systems administrators.

From chapter 6 to 12, we begin to see more in-depth material aimed at those who want to become more accomplished Linux users. Chapters 10 and 11 present particularly good treatment of maintaining networks and your system in general. I was surprised and pleased to see our site, www.linux.org, used in the traceroute example! In chapter 12, where file systems are revisited, I found the explanation of how to convert from an ext2, the traditional Linux filesystem to ext3, the newer and more secure journaling filesystem preferred by Red Hat, to be enlightening. For those of us maintaining older systems, that information will come in handy.

From chapter 13 on we see even more specific information about system maintenance. These chapters cover topics including installing programs using the famous RPM system and then managing what you've installed and updating via systems Yum and Apt, both available for Fedora Core. You'll also learn how to create a new Linux kernel, provide printing services email service, and FTP. Though I find the coverage good, as far as the kernel goes, I would like to have seen more examples of typical kernel configuration choices. There are many new systems administrators, in small businesses particularly, who end up running a Linux machine out of necessity. It would do them good to see how to choose options in the new kernel - options like Netfilter/IPTables support or common network card support. Another topic I would have covered differently is in the section on setting up an email server. Sobell focuses on Sendmail, which is indisputably the most widely-used mail transfer agent. However, more secure and more easily configurable alternatives like Postfix are growing in popularity. I would like to have seen equal time given to these alternatives - not just the short mention at the end of that chapter.

Chapters 21 through 26 deal with some of the more heavy-duty services offered on Linux systems, like NFS, Windows-style file sharing with Samba, firewalls, and the web server Apache. These chapters these provide decent explanations on setting up these services on your Linux machine.

Chapter 27 and 28 are aimed at developers, though the information on compilers and makefiles will be useful to those who download source code and compile programs from scratch. There's also a good explanation of using CVS, a tool to keep track of the files in development in any software project. The book ends with the last of three chapters dedicated to the shell in Linux. This chapter is a must-read for any systems administrator. Bash shell programming will make your life a whole lot easier and there are some good examples here.

After reading this book, it's impossible not to have obtained a level of proficiency with the Linux operating system. And as it comes with a set CDs with the latest version of Red Hat's Fedora Core, you should have enough with this one book to setup a personal, home office or small business server and keep it well maintained. Those starting off this year in their IT studies will find the examples and exercises in each chapter ideal for testing their knowledge. If you want to reach an advanced level and learn just what you need, without having to wade through any outdated or unnecessary information, then Mark Sobell's book is the right one for you.

Michael J. Jordan is the webmaster of Linux Online. He can be reached at Michael.Jordan**AT**linux.org