Product: Ubuntu Made Easy

I’m sure this book is heresy to someone; there’s a point in the book where the authors explicitly set aside the command line junkie approach in favor of covering Ubuntu the same way Mac OS X or Windows would be covered – from the GUI down. That I think is where this book is at its most successful; it’s not that there’s anything wrong with the traditional Unix-centric approach, but that’s not why people tend to pick Ubuntu in the first place. (Incidentally, Ubuntu has some pretty serious limitations, but the book gives you enough to work around most of them. Don’t try it without a fast net connection though.)

Just as the subtitle says, the book is very task oriented; although not quite a cookbook, it does get you started in that direction in fairly effective fashion. Command line stuff is covered somewhere about halfway through the book, well after the usual introductions to installation, the Nautilus file manager, etc, (including getting things like Flash and video drivers that Ubuntu doesn’t ship as part of the package for copyright reasons) and it focuses almost exclusively on shell commands, mostly bypassing scripting. Instead, the focus is on the operating environment itself, including the Unity desktop environment, and (most importantly) applications like LibreOffice and Shotwell. This part is actually a little bit firehoseish, as a lot of the apps mentioned need to be downloaded through Ubuntu Software Center; there’s so many apps and utility programs (and even a couple of games) to go through that it’s only possible to give very basic outlines of them. I’m not quite sure how it avoids being just a catalog of software, honestly.

Something very helpful that I’m seeing less and less of: Ubuntu 12.04 is provided on disc. I’m not sure why the computer book industry has reached the point where this should be remarkable, but the fact remains that Ubuntu, like any operating system distribution, is kind of a monster to download, so saving the effort of having to download the .iso should be especially helpful for people on satellite or 3/4G broadband with caps and quotas. And one thing I find very odd is the lack of coverage of file sharing; the default install, for some reason, fails to include Samba, which can be massively irritating if you need to get stuff on and off your computer; the book mentions Samba, but has nothing on how to install or configure it. Big, BIG oversight in an otherwise excellent book – enough to dock a full star, IMHO. It also doesn’t deal much with KDE, which is mostly understandable except that you might prefer the KDE/Calligra answers to the standard GNOME apps; this is only mildly annoying, but it does point to one of the major limitations of Unix culture in general, the neverending standards wars that the average Ubuntu user is likely to want nothing to do with.

Overall, though, this is yet another one of No Starch’s plain and simple computer books, and if you want to run a basic Ubuntu desktop system but have never really gotten into Linux beyond an Android phone, this is a great book to start with.
Rating: 4
1593274254
Count: 17