Fedora Linux 176
Ravi writes "Fedora — the Linux that is developed as a community effort, is the sand box of Red Hat. They incorporate all the new features after they have been exhaustively tested into its commercial product, namely Red Hat Enterprise Linux . Fedora has a 6 month release schedule and the most recent release is core 6. In all respects Fedora is the same Red Hat Linux but with cutting edge packages. What I really like about Fedora apart from the vibrant community participating in its development is the mark of quality it has from its association with Red Hat." Read the rest of Ravi's review.
| Fedora Linux | |
| author | Chris Tyler |
| pages | 650 |
| publisher | O'Reilly |
| rating | 9 |
| reviewer | Ravi |
| ISBN | 0-596-52682-2 |
| summary | An excellent book on setting up and configuring all aspects of Fedora Linux. |
Coinciding with the release of the latest version of Fedora, O'Reilly brought out the new book titled Fedora Linux authored by Chris Tyler. The book is divided into 10 chapters spanning over 600 pages with each chapter catering to a particular topic. Like all books of this genre, this book also starts by explaining how to install Fedora on ones machine. But what is different regarding the Fedora installer is that it provides a lot of flexibility, variety and finer control over the install process. Not surprisingly, the author has dedicated two chapters for explaining the various ways in installing Fedora. The first chapter titled "Quick start: Installing Fedora" covers the basic installation from start to finish. Where as the 10th chapter titled "Advanced Installation" covers the advanced features of the installer such as creating logical volumes and Raid during installation, automating the installation process using the kick start file, installing from locations other than a CD/DVD such as NFS and PXE boot as well as a detailed coverage of the Grub boot loader. This chapter also has a short section explaining how to install and use Xen virtual machines.
At a first glance, one might be tempted to bundle this book with the rest of the books available on this subject. But on close scrutiny, I discovered a certain method to the madness. That is each topic that is covered in the book is divided into 4 broad sections. There is a section titled "How do I do that?" which explains the nuts and bolts of accomplishing the given task. The next section titled "How does it work?" gives a good understanding of the theoretical concepts if any behind the topic, the third section titled "What about...?" introduces potential configuration bottlenecks and any additional tasks related to the topic and provides solutions to them. And lastly, there is a section titled "Where can I learn more...?" which provides a bunch of resources on the web and pointers to the respective documentation which will provide further insights about the topic being discussed. It is really refreshing to see this book take such a unique structured approach to explaining the concepts.
The 2nd chapter titled "Using Fedora on your Desktop" apart from covering details about Gnome and KDE Desktops also provides information about additional topics like configuring the XServer, adding new fonts and configuring sound and printing to work with Fedora. There are topics like partitioning a flash drive which makes this particular chapter quite interesting.
The third chapter titled "Using Fedora on your Notebook" explains how to configure Fedora to handle laptop specific features such as power management, mobile networking and configuring touch pad. This chapter also gives a firm introduction to configuring the networking interfaces be it the ethernet or wireless. One thing which holds Fedora in good stead over its peers is the good set of GUI front-ends available to configure each and every aspect of Linux. And configuring networking is no different. But the author does not limit himself to explaining the GUI way of configuring but also explains how to do it the command line way.
No book on Linux is complete without an in depth coverage of the basic commands used for system maintenance. The fourth chapter titled "Basic System Management" is one of the largest chapters in this book where the author explains all the important commands one might be expected to know to keep Fedora Linux in ship shape. Apart from the ubiquitous commands, I also found detailed pointers in enabling secure remote access to Fedora using SSH.
Package management forms the basis for the fifth chapter. Fedora has a great set of tools which aid the user in a variety of ways in installing, removing and upgrading packages. Fedora uses the software management system called RPM Package Manager. But with popular demand, it has also incorporated an apt-get like tool called Yum which automatically resolve dependency issues. I found this chapter to provide an in-depth coverage of all the tools related to package management in Fedora. For example, the author explains how to roll back the installation of a package to a state 10 minutes ago or for that matter to a previous date using the RPM tool. There is also a section which explains how to create ones own RPM packages.
The chapter titled "Storage management" gives a broad explanation of Logical volume management and setting up Raid. Fedora comes with its own LVM administration tool which makes it a snap to set up and manage logical volumes. The author after explaining how to accomplish creating, resizing and deleting logical volumes using this GUI tool, goes on to describe how to do it the command line way too which makes this chapter really useful. All along the chapter, I found useful tips on tasks such as creating backups of the disk and how to go about doing it, stopping a raid and so on.
But the one chapter which I found really comprehensive was the seventh chapter titled "Network Services". Here the author explains how to setup the gamut of network services including but not limited to DHCP server, BIND, CUPS print server, MySQL server, sendmail and more. This chapter spans around 100 pages. There is also a short section providing tips on analyzing the web and ftp logs.
Lets face it. Even though Fedora is a community supported venture backed by Red Hat, it has all the characteristics which propel it to the enterprise level. One of the notable characteristics is the extensive integration of SELinux (Security Enhanced Linux). SELinux controls what a program is and is not allowed to do, enforcing security policy through the kernel. Fedora has very good support for SELinux and has even developed GUI front-ends to make it much more easier to configure. In the 8th chapter, the author explains in detail the steps needed to configure and fine tune selinux on Fedora. This chapter also contain sections which explain the pluggable authentication module as well as other security related features such as configuring a firewall and using access control lists.
The unique structure in which the chapters are layed out makes it more suitable to be used as a reference more than a cover to cover read. The author is eloquent in his narration of the topics and has done a good job of explaining the concepts. I found this book to be an ideal resource for coming up to date with all the system and network administration tasks that can be accomplished in Fedora Linux.
Ravi Kumar maintains a blog where he shares his thoughts related to GNU/Linux, Open Source and Free Software at linuxhelp.blogspot.com. He has also reviewed in a concise way the history of GNU/Linux.
You can purchase Fedora Linux from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Comment on Fedora in general. (Score:2, Informative)
Format.
Install Fedora, update the kernel packages, VMTools up and running.
Easy.
I like Fedora and this book look like it could make anyone a more knowledgeable Fedora user.
Re:package manager need tons of work (Score:3, Informative)
It still needs to re-read the data, which takes longer than it should, but only has to call out to the network if something is likely to be different, which makes a *huge* difference when you're installing individual packages or querying it with search or info.
Take your blinkers off... (Score:2, Informative)
s/the/a/
I prefer Debian and here's why... (Score:3, Informative)
If you need a stable, easy-to-administer, well-established, production OS, I would suggest Debian.
Re:Misleading Summary (Score:5, Informative)
The sentence is poorly structured, hard to parse, and has a few grammatical errors (they/its), but is not backwards. It could use a couple of commas:
"They incorporate all the new features, after they have been exhaustively tested, into their commercial product..."
Re:More widely used than you'd know (Score:3, Informative)
I was pretty pleased with Fedora Core 2-4, felt like they were modern, without being bloated and slow like 8 & 9. FC5 was a real dog, though, so I don't know what to say about that. In all, I tend to use Fedora more than any other distro. It's got its issues, but when you use it enough, you just sort of tune them out by default.
Redhat and Fedora have their moments of brilliance, but you really have to watch 'em, they can bite you. Definitely not an automatic upgrade, whenever the new one comes out.
Re:package manager need tons of work (Score:5, Informative)
Reading and re-reading the data should be quicker now, too.
The repository data is stored in a giant XML file which is incredibly slow to parse. Back in the day, it would read this file in every time you ran yum. Last year [1] they added a SQLite cache, so this step could be skipped if the data hadn't changed.
Relatively recently, they added a separate yum-metadata-parser written in C that dramatically reduces the time the parse step takes. Take these changes together and what used to take 45.5 seconds every time you ran yum now takes 7.5 seconds only if the data have changed. [2]
It sounds like they've done as much as they can without changing the transferred data to be an indexed binary format (with the associated forward/backward compatibility complexity).
(I'm not running Fedora Core 6, so I'm not sure if this change made it in.)
[1] - Looks like [duke.edu] yum 2.3.1 introduced the cache, around March 2005.
[2] - See this message [duke.edu] introducing it around May 2006 sometime after yum 2.6.1.
Re:You didn't "setup" a VMware virtual Linux box. (Score:3, Informative)
More of a spelling flame I'd think. And on that subject, it's "grammar".
Save $5.60 by buying the book at Amazon.com! (Score:1, Informative)
Save yourself $5.60 by buying the book here: Fedora Linux [amazon.com]. That's a total savings of 17.51%!
Re:Missing a Chapter (Score:2, Informative)
This is Red Hat's contributions according to the Fedora Project (gives more detail about Red Hat's role in projects) http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/RedHatContributions [fedoraproject.org]
This is just another list of different projects: http://sourceware.org/projects.html [sourceware.org]
A lot of people underestimate how much Red Hat does. They have significantly more code in the kernel than any other entity, they are also responsible for a very large part of the GCC development, and most of the recent big improvements in GCC can be attributed to Red Hat. They also do a ton of dev for Gnome and have done wonderful things with GCJ. People give them a lot of shit, but a lot of OSS development would slow down drastically if they were taken out of the equation.
Regards,
Steve
My solution - UBUNTU (Score:1, Informative)
Yum and repos - very bad.
Updates are really huge and frequent.
I still manage to "destroy" (with normal usage) the RC till the start of another one, so a install of new RC comes handy (necessary ?)
Many bugs.
When I install a new RC, I have a lot of work to add what I want (work=time). And I have to do that with every RC and the list isn't getting nowhere.
Solution:
I tried Ubuntu. It was the first distro for me, that really worked. I love apt and the gui tools for apt. I love the repo philosophy of ubuntu. The hardware support for me was excelent. It supported my SD card reader out of the box
Multimedia support - excelent. Eclipse, java, PHP, MYsql, everything just works. Community - excelent
Do I need to say more ?