Fedora Linux

Preface

Welcome to Fedora Linux: A Complete Guide to Red Hat’s Community Distribution. I’ve based this book on the premise that the best way to learn Linux is to use it; each lab deals with a specific task or problem and starts with solutions. It then expands the discussion to explain the principles underlying the solutions and shows you where you can learn more about the topic if you want to dig deeper. Although the labs do build on each other in some small ways, I expect that most readers will jump from lab to lab according to their needs and interests rather than read the book linearly from front to back. Where appropriate, I have have included both graphical user interface and command-line techniques; use whichever approach suits your needs and style.

This book is written for experienced computer users, regardless of their previous experience with Linux. It covers both desktop and server configurations, and is ideally suited to an administrator or power user migrating to Fedora Linux from another environment, such as Windows, Mac OS X, or Unix.

This book is targeted at Fedora Core 6 but will also be useful to users of Fedora Core 5 and Fedora Core 7. Fedora is more than an operating system; it includes a wide range of applications, programming languages, and tools, and many of these packages are the subject of their own books. This book does not cover each topic in exhaustive detail; instead, it is designed to give you the most critical information in an accessible format and show you how the packages work within the context of Fedora.

Tip

At the time of writing, Fedora Core 6 was being finalized; my apologies for the inevitable little discrepancies between the screenshots and descriptions in this book and the final version of Fedora Core 6.