Ubuntu Kung Fu 253
Lorin Ricker writes "Back in the dark ages of windows-based GUIs, corresponding to my own wandering VMS evangelical days, I became enamored of a series of books jauntily entitled Xxx Annoyances (from O'Reilly & Assocs.), where "Xxx" could be anything from "Windows 95", "Word", "Excel" or nearly piece of software which Microsoft produced. These were, if not the first, certainly among the most successful of the "tips & tricks" books that have become popular and useful to scads of hobbyists, ordinary users, hackers and, yes, even professionals in various IT pursuits. I was attracted, even a bit addicted, to these if only because they offered to try to make some useful sense out of the bewildering design choices, deficiencies and bugs that I'd find rampant in Windows and its application repertory. Then I found Keir Thomas, who has been writing about Linux for more than a decade. His new "tips" book entitled, Ubuntu Kung Fu — Tips & Tools for Exploring Using, and Tuning Linux, and published by Pragmatic Bookshelf, is wonderful. Having only recently wandered into the light of Linux, open source software, and Ubuntu in particular, this book comes as a welcome infusion to my addiction." Read below for the rest of Lorin's review.
As a relatively young Linux distro, Ubuntu already sports a wealth of introductory and how-to books vying for the enthusiast's money — and I've already purchased a significant sampling of these which informs my opinion about the book here under review. And even for Ubuntu, the "tips & tricks" section of my own Linux bookshelf contains volumes which run from the encyclopedic to the practical — I'd even collected O'Reilly's Ubuntu Hacks (Oxer, Rankin & Childers) well before encountering Ubuntu Kung Fu.
| Ubuntu Kung Fu | |
| author | Keir Thomas |
| pages | 367 |
| publisher | Pragmatic Bookshelf |
| rating | 9 |
| reviewer | Lorin Ricker |
| ISBN | 1-934356-22-0 |
| summary | A very useful "tips and tricks" how-to book about Ubuntu Linux |
How well does Keir Thomas's new book fare in this crowded field? Does he provide actual unique value to the Ubuntu community, useful knowledge which is otherwise unavailable or hard to find? In a nutshell (oops, sorry... that's a book series for another time!): Yes, he does. In fact, he hits the target pretty squarely.
Ubuntu Kung Fu is organized as only three chapters (with no preface material at all): "1 Introduction," including obligatory "How to Read This Book," "Acknowledgments" and "Sharing" sections; "2 An Ubuntu Administration Crash Course"; and, the largest chapter by far, "3 The Tips" themselves.
Though it concentrates on rather basic material, the second chapter on Ubuntu administration is actually one of the best subject primers I've encountered so far, and is written directly and to-the-point. There's the right focus and enough detail to help those users making the initial transition from Windows to Linux/Ubuntu, including coaching on users and passwords, file system structure (see sidebar "Drive Letters and Ubuntu"), and guidance regarding "Command Line or GUI?".
For example, after weeks of my own stumbling about in the vast sea of information and opinion known as the Ubuntu Forums, searching in vain for a concise explanation on the distinction between a "virtual console" and a regular old "X-windows terminal" — as an old VMS hacker, I'd had experience with such things — I found exactly the explanation I needed, including Ctrl/Alt/F-key controls, in this chapter. The author manages to underline the relevance of this even to the novice Ubuntu user as it applies to "What do I do if things go wrong?", without getting mired in unneeded exotica.
This chapter continues with the necessary skills in software installation and management, including Synaptic and APT, packages and repositories, doing a good job of giving the novice his or her bearings to get started. It concludes with a decent orientation on config files and the gconf-editor, making and keeping backups, and what to do if it does all go wrong.
"The Tips," the third chapter, constitutes 315 separate items, covering over 300 pages, the big majority of the book. Each tip is clearly titled as to its purpose, and has a small check-box in the margin beside the title so that the reader has a place to mark the tip as to personal relevance and priority.
I suppose that the best way to give you a sense of the value of these tips is to provide a summary of my own "usage statistics", derived from my own check-box marks. When I first surveyed the book to get my own bearings, I used a yellow highlighter pen to color in the check-box for tips that caught my eye and that I especially wanted to get back to... Later, as I read through the entire "Tips" chapter, I made a check in the box for each tip I intended to return to for installation or implementation on my own Ubuntu box, and where appropriate, when I actually did install or implement the tip, I made an installation note as to time and details. A good many of the tips are for information or how-to skill only, with nothing to install or implement other than enhancing the reader's own understanding.
Of the 315 tips, I counted 108 (34%) that I marked with yellow highlight; 16 (5%) that I checked for implementation, but have not yet done so for one reason or another; and 19 (6%) that I've implemented on my system. Considering that any "tips & tricks" book ends up becoming a grab-bag of items with a hit-or-miss appeal to any particular person, this is a very good personal return-on-investment. Yet this breakdown is rather arbitrary, as many of the tips are techniques to know and use, rather than configurations to manage or applications to install. In other words, your mileage may vary.
Mr. Thomas's grab-bag is typical in its variety and scope — there's likely something for everyone, both Ubuntu novice and expert, in this book. And, true to style for such volumes, the author notes this about his "big book of tips": "...that you can jump in anywhere." This goes to the heart of my only notable criticism of the book, one of organization. Unlike many "tips" books, where there's usually some attempt to organize the presentation of topical items into a somewhat obvious order, the editorial decision for UKF was to explicitly order the tips randomly — this was no accident, as the author makes explicit in a couple of his remarks.
Indeed, reading through the "Tips" chapter in page-order is no different than embarking on a thorough reading in random order — there simply is no rhyme-or-reason to the presentation of items. This is particularly frustrating because there are numerous instances of tips which are closely related by subject or purpose, and for which the reader would be well served by having them grouped on successive pages for ease of reference and purpose.
That this was an editorial decision is made clear by the fact that the Table of Contents is itself 10 pages long, listing every single tip in the book, and is then followed by a secondary, equally lengthy "Contents by Topic" which attempts to group the tips by general category, "Application Enhancements", "Command Line Tricks", "General Productivity Tips", etc. Furthermore, the editorial effort was made to cross-reference related tips in the text, under Tip 39, we find "...see Tip 173, on page 204, and Tip 228, on page 260," and so on. For all this cross-referencing and contents by topic effort, wouldn't it have been more effective to simply organize the tips in a semblance of relationship, commonality and order? After all, having done a "Contents by Topic", why not just go ahead and organize the book accordingly?
For some readers, the random shuffling of tips may not matter much, as so much of the information will be newly encountered and of subjectively individual value. And value there is aplenty in this book! I'll close by noting four items which were of particular interest and value to me, things for which I'd been previously searching for without luck, or which I didn't even know existed in the open source world of resources:
First, on the ubiquitous implementation of yet another Trashcan for file deletion in a File Manager (the Gnome Nautilus app, which is prevalently used on Ubuntu): GUI designers just can't get over the fact that "mere mortals" might actually delete files and not really mean it... hence, the Trashcan mechanism to protect them from their own silly actions.
This is actually a two-edged sword, and I'd been caught in the quandary of having intended to really delete some application files, which happen to have been root-owned, only to have them get snagged in my file system's Trashcan. The real quandary commenced when, using sudo, I tried to figure out how to delete them from the command line — but where in the heck is "the Trashcan"? I could see the files in Nautilus (where I couldn't conveniently use sudo-power to delete them), but following my own hunches as to where-in-the-file-system the Trashcan was actually stored turned up empty-handed.
UKF to the rescue — see Tips 39, 228 and 309 for everything you'd need to know about handling the Trashcan from the command line.
Secondly, I'd become quite fond of enhanced cut-&-paste (multiple) clipboard capabilities under Windows. Again, UKF to the rescue: Tip 306 let me know of an open source (KDE) clipboard enhancement known as Klipper (it's in the Ubuntu Repositories), which scratches this itch most satisfactorily.
Third, although Ubuntu provides basic, rudimentary tools (Gnome and KDE) for capturing screen shots, until I got to Tip 313, I didn't know that the GIMP could be used to augment and sophisticate screen shot capturing! And, of course, you can refine, edit and save your shots in any GIMP-available format directly. A great enhancement, if only to my working GIMP knowledge!
Lastly, like most folks, I've got a dark side, secrets which must be kept — things like account numbers, passwords, and other personal arcana which cannot, or should not, be kept in unencrypted form. Again, under Windows, I'd found an encryption technology known as TrueCrypt which I'd employed (and paid for) on that platform for a couple of years prior — and with my transition to Linux, I had mistakenly assumed that I had to abandon TrueCrypt as a Windows-only app.
Imagine my surprise and delight when I encountered Tip 145, which informed me that TrueCrypt includes an open source licensed release for Linux, including exactly where to go to install it and how best to use it! Bravo, and thank you, Mr. Thomas, for helping me resurrect an old and trusted friend!
In summary, it should be apparent that, in spite of my grumblings about the random tip presentation, I think that Keir Thomas's Ubuntu Kung Fu is a wonderful book — address the organization issues in a second edition, and I think it'd become an exemplar of its type. I recommend it highly to anyone who has become, or is becoming, an Ubuntu Linux user and enthusiast. It usefully helps bridge the gap between the Microsoft Windows experience and the not-so-different world of the Linux desktop. It provides ample practical help and knowledge to advance your productive use of Ubuntu Linux. This book takes a pride-of-place position right beside my copy of Ubuntu Hacks, where I can refer to it whenever I've a hankering to implement "that new thing" I remember having read about.
You can purchase Ubuntu Kung Fu from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Ubuntu annoyances? (Score:5, Interesting)
Every system has its share of problems. I'm sure Ubuntu is no less deserving of an Annoyances title than any other. What would you nominate for a chapter in Ubuntu Annoyances?
Personally, my nomination would be still having to edit fstab as root to permanently mount a network share. Mapping a network drive is dead simple in Windows. It should be just as easy on Ubuntu.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Ubuntu annoyances? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:So much for free! (Score:3, Interesting)
There are two easy ways to get hardware working on linux
Re:Free Linux Docs Re:So much for free! (Score:3, Interesting)
the FREE documentation is going to have to be perhaps a bit more standardized, easier to find, easier to use, etc.
I don't think that would do much good for your alleged goal (getting Linux to be mainstream), but I kinda agree with you there. These days whenever someone asks me for help on learning Linux, I always point them to the FreeBSD Handbook and tell them to ignore anything with the word "ports" in it, however it's clearly aimed more at admins unfamiliar with UNIX-derived OSes than it is to Jane Grandma or Joe Geeky Grandson, so I'd also like to see something else to fill that niche.
Yeah, there's always the Ubuntu forums, but there's a psychological thing about having a book that makes you more confident about the content, and makes you feel all tingly inside. Though even considering the purchase of this book, they'd come out ahead compared to a Windows Vista license *and* they get to keep the book ;)
Re:Ultimate ubuntu kung fu move (Score:2, Interesting)
About a year ago I switched from gentoo to OpenBSD on the servers here at work (postfix/spamassassin/courier-imap etc, snort, openvpn, apache/mysql, vsftpd) and haven't looked back since.
I know this is considered /. heresy, but I really believe that windows is the best OS for the desktop. I've run gentoo, suse, mandrake, redhat, centos, federoa, ubuntu, and I'm sure a few others over the years and none of them have even come CLOSE to the usability of windows.
I have a feeling that I'm not the minority here, either. I runx Xming on my desktop at work and use putty's X11 forwarding to view things like etherape (wish they would write a client for windwos..that is a really neat piece of software) when I need X, and use putty for everything else.
As long as your head is firmly rammed up your ass you should be fine doing the same. Run firefox with noscript. Keep the install light and enjoy being able to install things like the latest version of flash the day that they come out.
OpenBSD for [most] of the servers, gentoo for the rest, and windows on the desktop.
Re:I also give the book a 9...I own it (Score:4, Interesting)
Yep. I have "Ubuntu Linux Bible" by von Hagen sitting on the bookshelf right next to my desk. I've never opened it. Maybe it's a fine book, but ubuntuforums is such a good resource that I've never reached for the book. One problem with printed books is that they get out of date fast. My biggest hassles with ubuntu have always been with things that were changing rapidly. E.g., for a while with Hardy I couldn't get java applets to work on my x64 box. The von Hagen book was published long before the problem started occurring, and the problem no longer occurs on Intrepid, so there was no way a printed book was ever going to provide useful info on it. Ubuntuforums also does better at stuff that's out in the long tails. E.g., I had a lot of hassles trying to get Amazon.com's mp3 selling service to work right, and once I finally figured it out I posted a howto on ubuntuforms. This is the kind of thing that not enough people care about to justify putting it in a printed book.
Re:So much for free! (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah, I know - my post was supposed to be tongue-in-cheek. I've only been using linux about 3 years myself, but have never really suffered the 'hardware hell' problems so many seem to.
The one occasion was when I needed hard copy for something, so bought a ridiculously cheap Epson D78. Couldn't get the bugger to work on Slack 10.2 (or 11; can't remember now). Spent a good few hours on it including a bit of '.configure/make/make install' malarkey with no luck, so slung it on top of the aforementioned wardrobe and blagged a C44 from a mate.
My nephew came round this morning wanting something printing out, but the C44 was out of ink. I plugged the D78 in (ubuntu 8.10) and it worked straight away - none of that 'Found new Hardware' crap, just appeared in the list of available printers and off she went. I had a quick browse of /. while the stuff was printing and the experience seemed relevant to the discussion (at least it did at the time).
Incidentally, my nephew had to come round because his printer (Lexmark all-in-one thingy) 'wasn't working'. His dad belongs to that 'class of users' you were talking about; when he bought the printer it wouldn't work (required XP, he was still on W98 - 'Why didn't they tell me that in the shop'). The current problem is probably trivial, but it won't get fixed till I go round there. Point being, the 'class of user' you are talking about will have problems with Windows stuff just as much as linux stuff.
Re:All you really need to know (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Simple shit you didn't know existed (Score:4, Interesting)
'man man' and 'man hier' to start.
Damn... I've been running Linux first as a server then eventually as my primary desktop since Red Hat 4 (no, not RHEL, I mean what Red Hat was before Fedora existed) and I've never seen any previous mention of "man hier". That one would have come in useful a time or two!
GP, I guess it must be a difference in learning styles... like I said, though I ran Linux server(s) for years, I just this past year switched from Windows to Ubuntu on the desktop, and though the learning curve was indeed rather steep, making the decision to jump in the deep end and go whole hog helped force me to learn. Kinda like how I learned how to drive a manual transmission by buying one :)
As far as "care and feeding"... I am continually blown away by how awesome APT and Synaptic are in Ubuntu. You can do things like switch your entire window system from Gnome to KDE and back again, upgrade software while it's running, fix broken installs, etc. all from a single interface. Third-party vendors often provide their own repositories that automatically tie in, resolve dependencies, and let you know when updates are available, again from the same interface. And you aren't forced to run system update as an ActiveX control through a crappy browser :)
And those "required" Windows apps I thought I needed? I don't miss them at all. I've either found open equivalents or realized I just didn't really need them as much as I thought I did.