Product: 1593270348

A very up to date book for 2004⁄5. Grant deals with what would have been Red Hat Linux 10. There is officially no such thing, because in 2003, Red Hat announced that it was concentrating on its corporate products, where it would actually make some money. In retrospect, all us users who had downloaded the earlier free versions of Red Hat had been lucky for years. So independently of Red Hat, volunteers made what is now called the Fedora Core. (Fedora as in ‘hat’.) This book comes with 2 CDs for it.
Having used Red Hat Linux 9 and now the Fedora Core, I have to agree with Grant. There are many changes, but clearly evolutionary. Anyone who has used KDE will be comfortable here. The UI has gotten smoother. Even easier to use. And the functionality has increased; evermore RPM packages.
Grant pitches this book towards nontechnical users; he assumes no prior acquaintance with linux. But you know what? Even current linux users may want to check out his writings, looking for new material in Fedora. Certainly, some of you will refrain on principle. You’d rather learn it from the UI. Which is fine for power users. But others may be more pragmatic and consult this book.
One slight caveat is that perhaps in a future edition, he could also discuss running linux on the AMD 64 bit Opteron. There is already a version of Fedora for this. And the chip is far cheaper than Intel’s 64 bit offering.
Rating: 4
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