On Sat, 2004-03-27 at 00:52, Rob Blomquist wrote:
On Friday 26 March 2004 8:08 pm, William Hatfield pondered and enlightened us with:
I haven't quite got the hang of how to install things on Mandrake. I downloaded the Starter Guide, but it is still like greek to me.
Be patient. With time, and with some effort, it will quickly begin to resemble not Greek, but Esperanto. :*)
Several books that I have used include:
LINUX: THE COMPLETE REFERENCE, 5/E THE LINUX COOKBOOK LINUX ETUDES RUNNING LINUX
I'll second the recommendation for "Running Linux," which I'm currently working my way through. At times it gets a little heavy or technical for a casual user, but on the whole it does a pretty good job of explaining basic concepts in an understandable manner.
RUTE is also good.
What is wrong here people? Oh, that's right. WTF is rute says the complete newbie!?! The Rute users guide is a project/book aiming at a fairly good intro to whizz of Linux:
http://www.icon.co.za/~psheer/book/index.html
its "free" but you can also buy a hard copy. It's definitely worth a look.
I had a look at Sams RedHat 9 book and found that there was reasonably little that was different to Mandrake. Except Redhat is for goons...:-)
Also worth a look if you want a massive manual to make you feel a little more secure.
That said, I still know /so/ little ... yet, it's volumes more than I knew 5-6 weeks ago. Some problems I've been able to figure out on my own, others with the patient help of those here in this group, and others I still don't understand well enough to tackle ... those I've put aside for a later time when, hopefully, things will have "fallen into place" for me and they'll be a piece of cake. :-)
One of the problems with Linux books is there current-ness. Many books offered are way out of date. Mandrake is very similar to Red Hat, so a current Red Hat book could be a good buy. But don't leave us, as there is alot of useful stuff that is not documented in books, that only we Mandrake folks know about.
I'd also recommend -- being somewhat of a miser myself, and on a very limited income at the moment -- checking out the used book sources (such as Amazon, or perhaps http://www.bookfinder.com). That's what I did a few weeks back when I was first getting my Linux feet wet, and managed to pick up like-new, current editions of "Running Linux," "Linux Desk Reference," and "Linux in a Nutshell" for around $50 total, S&H included.
And the pundits that talk about how linux is not ready for the desktop have no idea what they are talking about. Linux has been ready for this desktop for the last 4 years. I run a 100% MS free PC. My processor has never seen MS code.
Linux is certainly ready for the desktop ... I would, however, say that most (more casual) users are not ready for Linux. :-)
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