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
Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft?
Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
