Product Description

* Linux is the most popular open source operating system; Red Hat has strong international distribution and, according to IDC, controls approximately 700f the Linux market in the United States
* Red Hat updates twice a year; this book shows Linux newcomers as well as users of earlier versions how to install, configure, and use the newest version
* Covers preparing the hard drive for Linux, connecting to a network or the Internet, working with the GNOME interface, playing media files, and working with the file system
* Features a new security chapter that shows how to implement firewalls and other basic and advanced systems
* CD-ROM includes Red Hat Linux 9 Publisher's Edition

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #684268 in Books
• Published on: 2003-05-12
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 390 pages

Review
“…entertainingly covers all the essential bases for getting started.” (Linux Format, August 2003)

“…entertainingly covers all the essential bases for getting started.” (Linux Format, August 2003)

From the Back Cover
Install and configure Red Hat Linux 9 – no experience needed!

Interface with GNOME,TM connect to a wireless network, and build a firewall

Put the power of the penguin in your PC with this handy, plain-English guide to Red Hat Linux 9. In no time, you can have Red Hat Linux installed, get connected to the Internet, play media files, work with Word documents, set up a Web server, customize your own flexible, powerful workstation, and do it all for peanuts!

All this on 2 bonus CD-ROMs

• Publisher’s Edition of Red Hat Linux 9
• Includes Apache Web Server, GNU™ compiler, GNOME and KDE Desktop, and more!

About the Author
Jon "maddog" Hall is a world-renowned Linux expert and advocate.
Paul G. Sery works for Sandia National Laboratories. Both are prolific authors.

Customer Reviews

You will not be a dummie if you buy this book!! Awesome!
I cannot thank and commend the authors enough (John "Maddog" Hall and Paul G. Sery) for their outstanding job in writing Red Hat Linux 9 for Dummies (RHL9D). I have been looking for a quick and comprehensive book for Linux beginners like this one for a long time. This book may say it's for dummies, but after you are done with this, you will feel like a genius. Trust me, you NEED this book like Osama bin Laden needs a good shower and a fat missile to the arse!

I bought the boxed set (personal ed.) of Red Hat 9, and was able to get by with the manual included there for installing Red Hat (since it is pretty easy), but using the Red Hat desktop features is another story because the boxed set does not give you a user's guide (well, you do get a CD ROM that has the user's documentation, but who wants to wade through that??)! RHL9D will expertly guide you through the install and then show you how to "use" Red Hat 9. After all, if you are like me, the very first thing you want to do after installing an OS is to use music CDs (including burning CD's and watching DVD's), MP3's, games, e-mail, and surfing the Internet. RHL9D does it all and fast too!

Coming from the crash-prone, pay-for-everything MS Windows world, I was very skeptical in thinking RHL9D could quickly replace Windows. Red Hat spanked Windows plus a whole lot more (except crash)! Besides including a myriad of "free" utilities and games, you also get OpenOffice that is the equivalent of MS Office, and it can open your MS documents!! I have been waiting for the day when I could lose Windows for Linux. That day is here and I cannot be happier!

Don't worry, you can still use MS Windows because Linux partitions a section of your hard drive for it's own use, thus giving you a dual-boot system (Windows+Linux). I recommend buying a second hard drive and installing Red Hat there, but you don't have to.

In short, Red Hat Linux is all it's cranked up to be and much more-thanks to this book! This book is worth 3x the asking price for saving me the headaches and frustration of wading through nerdy tomes of Unix/Linux jargon offered in other books just to do a simple Linux task via the dreaded command line! It beats the hell of wading through the Linux CD-ROM documentation or "man" pages too!

I cannot praise this book enough. By the way, before you go out and buy Red Hat Linux 9-DON'T! The authors have also included the personal edition here for free (minus the source code CD's which you don't need anyway unless you are a Linux guru, and if that were the case, why would you be interested in this book??). You cannot ask for more than that! Author's, if you're reading this, thank you, thank you, THANK YOU!!

good for partitioning and installing...not a lot of content
This book is great for getting the newest version of Red Hat and getting step-by-step installation instructions, but the rest of the book does not get heavily into using Linux other than for connecting to the internet and using some basic programs. I was hoping for some stuff on shell programming, for example, but nothing at all like that appears in this book. Still, I would've been lost as far as partitioning and installing without this book. It just became a bit useless afterward.

Sketchy, full of assumption
This started off for the newbie but quickly assumes you have run Linux before. Not a lot of detail in the area of text commands which is like old DOS and the core of the system. It did help in setup of the included CDs which I did not have a problem installing. All of the Linux distributions are quickly being snatched up by corporations making them more controlling just like the Microsoft empire. What every happened to Free or the idea of open source?