One thing that's a rarity in the part of Canada that I live in is a book that acknowledges that Mandrake even exists. So you can imagine my delight when the cover of a recent release by Sybex called Linux Power Tools said it covered Mandrake. Imagine even further my delight to see Mandrake handled on a par with Red Hat and SuSe rather than being parked in a deep dark appendix.
The book covers just about everything you want covered in the setup and maintenance of a system. Bear in mind though that it's not going to cover everything. What it does cover, in dizzying array, is hardware tools, user tools, system administration tools, networking and server tools. I say in dizzyin array because it covers all differences in the different distros that it covers. No one size fits all here. Where Mandrake handles things uniquely that is covered. A notable exception is urpmi which, sadly, isn't in any detail. This seems to be that urpmi has no gui to automate updates. MCC, msec and others are fully covered though. The writer appears to be very familiar with our favourite bird in the penguin flock and has used it to demonstrate the KDE enviornment using a 9.1 beta. It's targeted at Intermediate/Advanced users, though a newbie might get some very good ideas from it. The reason that this isn't a full review is that I'm still working through it. :-) That said I'd recommend it highly. The author is Roderick W. Smith, a columnist in Linux Magazine and author of "Linux Samba Server Administration: and "Linux+ Study Guide". ttfn John
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