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Linux Books for Linux Users
By Jesse Morgan | October 29, 2005
You know what I’d like to see?
Someone plop down a series of books aimed at introducing a user or Sys admin of a particular Linux Distribution to another Distribution; for example “Administrating Redhat Enterprise Linux 3 for Debian Administrators” or “Using Suse for Gentoo Users” .
Hell, they don’t even have to be big books- maybe 200-600 pages. Ebooks would probably be the way to go since it will probably not sell a whole lot of copies.
I say this because there is a giant disconnect between users of different distributions. As a Gentoo and Debian users, I’ve noticed the hatred between these two groups- if someone in the #debian channel finds out I also use gentoo, I’m pretty much mocked and ignored. If you’re used to using one set of tools, there’s no guide to give you a work-alike.
This complaint comes from the fact that I’m using Redhat at my new job, and Redhat is considered a “Beginners” distribution by a lot of people- including authors. If you’re already fairly competent with Linux, do you really need a walkthrough of basic utilities? I’ve configured samba a hundred times, and you’re showing me the exact same thing- I want to know if you’re doing anything DIFFERENT.
You know what? That’s it. I’ll add it to my Lotto List- “Publish series of books called Diff: admining X for Y admins”
October 29th, 2005 at 4:08 am
you know, this would probably be useful for windows->linux, bsd->linux and mac->linux as well.
November 3rd, 2005 at 8:52 am
That is what I dislike about the open-source community. The lunatic fringe that thinks life revolves and is determined by the distribution you use.
A true sysadm knows that you need different tools for different jobs. Just like a carpenter doesn’t have a tool box full of hammers to do a job, he has saws, wrench and such. The same way the sysadm uses different tools to complete the job. If this means using a different distro or even Windows, Novel or MacOSX for a particular job, then so be it. But the zealots get their panties all in a bunch and gives the rest of us open source users a bad name as being entitled, arrogant, not easy to work with, demeaning and all the other labels the big company’s use to steer prospective open source users away from the community.
steps down from soap box