The growth and the penetration of the Linux Operating System in the recent years has caused an increase in both the need for professionals familiar with Linux and an increase in the sheer number of available books, journals, web sites, etc, that cover this topic. Morrill's book on Tuning and Customizing a Linux Operating System finds its way to the top of the "must read" stack due to its applicable coverage of the topic. The author starts with the Linux mentality and "physiology" and delves into the details of how to build, maintain and administrator a Linux-bases workstation or PC. Other book cover the commands, or at a more engineering level, cover programming in the Linux environment, but this book talks about how to actually build a Linux-based system and how to configure it. Talks about how the file system in configured, and why the directory structure is the way it is. It talks about how to install, remove or update software packages to your system under three popular Linux OS distributions.
To me, the most valuable part of this book was the explanation of why "things" are the way they are. For example, why there are /etc, /usr/etc/ and /usr/local/etc in the directory structure of Linux? And why you should pick or refer to one over the other if you need to look for a configuration file? To me, these are the details in one handy chapter that is very hard to find, and one would only get that type of information from an expert who has been working in the field for a number of years. The example I just gave is along the same lines of the other examples and topics that you find in this book. Three different Linux distributions are covered: Red Hat, Slackware and Debian. Each distribution is covered in detail, and their differences are pointed out. The authors show the reader how to do basic administration and tuning for any of these packages. The package installation utilities such the RPM from Red Hat, the Slackware's classic tarballs, and the dpkg program from the Debian distribution are discussed and compared. The options pertaining to package customization are covered in detail, and examples are given for each tool.
You need to keep in mind that this book teaches you how to install and configure your Linux system, and how to navigate your way around it. This book does not cover each command nor does it cover the programming aspects of Linux. It discusses the installation and manipulation of the operation system and any software package that you may want to install and configure on your system. Six popular programs are given as an example of the various ways that almost any software package is installed on Linux. These packages include:
* The OpenSSH Secure Shell
* The Pluggable Authentication Modules
* SOCKS Library
* Apache HTTP Server
* CVS
* Java JDK
In addition to being a very useful reference, these examples portray how manage any software installation in Linux. The three different Linux distributions are referred to throughout the text, and the variations between how each system is manipulated and customized to take advantage of the newly installed software is given.
The author brings the book to a closure with detailing two case studies: how to build a simple desktop system, and how to setup a corporate software development environment. All the topics covered in the text are revisited with these two case studies to bring the topic to a full closure.
