Linux Cookbook
By Carla Schroder
First Edition November 2004
Series: Cookbooks
ISBN: 0-596-00640-3
592 pages
While few of us call ourselves chefs, we are all able to open a cookbook, locate a recipe, follow simple instructions, and get acceptable results – unless we’re trying to cook lobster thermidor aux crevettes with a Mornay sauce served in a Provençal manner with shallots and aubergines, garnished with truffle pâté, brandy, with a fried egg on top and SPAM ™ right off the bat. Master sugar cookies first. Start with a simple recipe, then try something else. The process of incremental building will make you a more competent and confident user with each step.
This is the premise for O’Reilly’s Cookbook Series. As the author Carla Schroder, writes: the book is “light on theory and heavy on how-to-make-this-go.” Early recipe groups are the simplest – how to find and use documentation or how to use package management software. In later chapters, you’ll learn how to run Apache, share files and printers with Samba, manage a Domain Name Sever, print, configure network time, compile from source code, detect hardware, manage users and groups, record CD/DVDs, customize kernels, do system rescue and recovery, and more…
For me, the greatest benefit of this book is that it isn’t necessary to read this book from cover to cover to benefit from it (though some recipes do depend on knowledge gained in prior recipes). Simply flip to the chapter that contains a topic that concerns you, and look for the problem you are having – chances are, it’s there (and there may be additional projects that you thought were out of your grasp, but look simple once the steps are laid out for you). Within each chapter, typical tasks are covered using a standard format: Problem, Solution, Discussion, and See Also (references to other related recipes). For example, Recipe 23.23 — “Sharing Windows Printers with Linux” details commands to enter and files to edit on each box in order to print from your Linux computer to the printer on a Windows computer. Recipe 19.2 “Building A Local Time Server” describes how to synchronize one of your computers with a public time server, while recipe 19.3 explains how to synchronize other local machines on a LAN with the local time server.
This is indeed a useful, practical guide for tweaking your Linux box, and an excellent tool for those wishing to become more technically savvy without having to wade through technical language.
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