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.
More widely used than you'd know (Score:2, Interesting)
package manager need tons of work (Score:4, Interesting)
Having said all this, I hope yum has imoproved in FC6, yet to try that though.
Re:Misleading Summary (Score:2, Interesting)
Indeed. Better support at ubuntu forums. But, I think the support is better at ubuntu forums than at any RHEL forums.
2. Buggier. Look at the distros created with the Enterprise source code. That's a production ready OS. FC is not.
Indeed, FC is buggier than RHEL. But RHEL is buggier than most other distros too. Not a reference in my mind.. Especially in package management. I don't even count the problems in RPM database I have had.
3. (b)leading edge everything where applicable. Comparable to Debian unstable IMHO.
Not really, it's bleeding edge, but bleedier than debian unstable. Debian unstable is stable compared to FC.
4. Red Hat's Management/Sales probably don't like "free as good as paid version" statement either.
It is not "as good" as paid version. Paid version sucks and FC sucks even more, so FC sucks more than the already sucking "paid version". It seems that you have to pay for support in buggy applications, like Oracle or the likes, and you don't have to pay for stable applications like postgresql.
Now honestly, I have had much more issues with RHEL (which is usually more stable than FC) than with debian unstable. I know I will be modded down for this post and I know I will probably be flamed by RH zealots, but FC sucks and is probably one of the worst distros. In my mind FC stability is even worse than windows, sorry for this. That doesn't mean I would use windows, but I certainly wouldn't use FC either in a production environment (or even on any of my desktops).
Fedora for Enterprise? (Score:2, Interesting)
I can't imagine anybody in large corporations wants to spend all their time and bandwidth propagating bleeding-edge software updates.
my observations with core 6 (Score:2, Interesting)
-Frequently crashes on I/O errors (I assume a bad driver, not working well with dual core?).
-Inconsistency between control panels (too many tools do the same thing, scattered around the system).
-File sharing is a _little_ easier to setup, but I still had issues with it. Why can't a right click a folder, set permissions, and share?
-Fonts are still INCREDIBLY UGLY and illegible even after almost 10 years of Redhat.
-Still can't play
-Can't play divx out of the box
-Flash wasn't installed with Firefox.
Yeah, there are probably ways I could fix the last three, but come on, these should be standard. Are any other flavors of Linux ready for the consumer desktop? I mostly just use it for research, because it's a good platform for that. I can't stand it though for just a desktop OS. I've done slackware before, even scarier to me. Any other distro suggestions?
Fedora's version of KDE lacks polish, attention (Score:4, Interesting)
Some of the Fedora 6 changes (like taking away MP3 playing capability from KDE music players) are justified on a legal basis, but other changes (like using a 4-year old window decoration and widget styles) are at best the result of ineptitude or at worst a deliberate attempt to make KDE look bad and outdated.
Re:The answer is simple - OpenSSH (Score:1, Interesting)
OpenBSD has grown out of their one man project. It is time for OpenBSD to become a propper organization. Giving money to OpenBSD is the same as privatly giving money to Theo. Theo have done a lot of good things, but I do not like to give money to a person.
I do not give money to Linus, RMS, Alan Cox or any other important developer either. But I do give money to organizations and companies.
I do buy the OpenBSD CDs, but that is it for now.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cygnus_Solutions [wikipedia.org] - Cygnus is a major contributor to gcc. Cygnus has been a part of Red Hat for many years now.
Re:Gentoo? (Score:4, Interesting)
I used it for a few years because it was the only functional fully 64 bit distro out there at the time and found it to be fairly easy to use if you read the documentation (which is quite good). Its drawback is that you actually have to read the doc (even if you've already installed a dozen other distributions) or it won't work very well.
After that, it's all a matter of taste of course. It's neither better nor worse than the others, it has advantages and drawbacks. And of course basically it installs the same stuff as everybody else. If you have some spare time it's interesting to try as a fairly different approach to a common problem though.