CentOS Bible

Foreword

The CentOS Project started off in late 2003 to fulfill a very specific need that a few people had for a non-commercial Linux distribution that they could use for their own requirements. Since then it's grown into a very large and well entrenched operating system around the world.

I've been involved with The project since the very early days, and I could never have imagined the project becoming so popular in the years to come. The one thing that I know has contributed to the project's success has been that CentOS Linux really is a community-centric distribution. The idea of a community-centric distribution is quite simple — the product is the community, not the code or the applications. That is what CentOS really is: a group of people with a shared common interest in the code that is used to build the distribution, applications, enhancements, and tools. This continually growing group of people, loosely tied together, is what makes CentOS such a desirable plat form for business and serious computing requirements. Problems are easily tackled, advice for newcomers is always available, and the shared knowledge pool in this community is second to none. Some users even go as far as to say that this community-driven knowledge pool is a far superior technical resource than most high cost commercial support offerings.

One area where new users have struggled, however, has been the lack of any good books or documentation that is CentOS specific that they might be able to work with, and ...