Product Description

Everything you need to know about Linux is in this book. Written by Stephen Figgins, Ellen Siever, Robert Love, and Arnold Robbins -- people with years of active participation in the Linux community -- Linux in a Nutshell, Sixth Edition, thoroughly covers programming tools, system and network administration tools, the shell, editors, and LILO and GRUB boot loaders.

This updated edition offers a tighter focus on Linux system essentials, as well as more coverage of new capabilities such as virtualization, wireless network management, and revision control with git. It also highlights the most important options for using the vast number of Linux commands. You'll find many helpful new tips and techniques in this reference, whether you're new to this operating system or have been using it for years.

• Get the Linux commands for system administration and network management
• Use hundreds of the most important shell commands available on Linux
• Understand the Bash shell command-line interpreter
• Search and process text with regular expressions
• Manage your servers via virtualization with Xen and VMware
• Use the Emacs text editor and development environment, as well as the vi, ex, and vim text-manipulation tools
• Process text files with the sed editor and the gawk programming language
• Manage source code with Subversion and git

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #68057 in Books
• Published on: 2009-09-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 942 pages

From the Publisher
Comprehensive but concise, Linux in a Nutshell is an essential desktop reference for the commands that users of Linux utilize every day. It covers all substantial user, programming, administration, and networking commands for the most common Linux distributions. It's several quick references rolled into one: sed, gawk, RCS, CVS, vi, Emacs, bash, tcsh, regular expressions, package management, bootloaders, and desktop environments are all covered in this clear, to-the-point volume, along with core command-line utilities.

About the Author
Ellen Siever is a writer and editor specializing in Linux and other open source topics. In addition to Linux in a Nutshell, she coauthored Perl in a Nutshell. She is a long-time Linux and Unix user, and was a programmer for many years until she decided that writing about computers was more fun.

Stephen Figgins honed many of his computer skills while working as O'Reilly's book answer guy. A life long learner with many interests, Stephen draws on many resources to make difficult topics understandable and accessible.

Now living in Lawrence, Kansas, he administrates Linux servers for Sunflower Broadband, a cable company. When not found working with computers, writing, or spending time with his family, you will likely find him outdoors. Stephen teaches wilderness awareness and living skills.

Robert Love has been a Linux user and hacker since the early days. He is active in--and passionate about--the Linux kernel and GNOME desktop communities. His recent contributions to the Linux kernel include work on the kernel event layer and inotify. GNOME-related contributions include Beagle, GNOME Volume Manager, NetworkManager, and Project Utopia. Currently, Robert works in the Open Source Program Office at Google.

Robert is the author of Linux Kernel Development (SAMS 2005) and the co-author of Linux in a Nutshell (2006 O'Reilly). He is also a Contributing Editor at Linux Journal. He is currently working on a new work for O'Reilly that will be the greatest book ever written, give or take. Robert holds a B.A. in Mathematics and a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Florida. A proud Gator, Robert was born in South Florida but currently calls home Cambridge, MA.

Arnold Robbins, an Atlanta native, is a professional programmer and technical author. He has worked with Unix systems since 1980, when he was introduced to a PDP-11 running a version of Sixth Edition Unix. He has been a heavy AWK user since 1987, when he became involved with gawk, the GNU project's version of AWK. As a member of the POSIX 1003.2 balloting group, he helped shape the POSIX standard for AWK. He is currently the maintainer of gawk and its documentation. He is also coauthor of the sixth edition of O'Reilly's Learning the vi Editor. Since late 1997, he and his family have been living happily in Israel.

Excerpted from Linux in a Nutshell by Ellen Siever, Aaron Weber, Stephen Figgins. Copyright © 2005. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 4 Boot Methods
This chapter describes some techniques for booting your Linux system. Depending on your hardware and whether you want to run any other operating systems, you can configure the system to boot Linux automatically or to provide a choice between several operating systems. Choosing between operating systems is generally referred to as dual booting, although you can actually boot more than two.

Once your Linux system is installed, rebooting the system is generally straightforward. But with the wide variety of hardware and software in use, there are many possibilities for configuring your boot process. The most common choices are:

• Boot Linux from a floppy or bootable CD, leaving any other operating system to boot from the hard drive.
• Use the Linux Loader, LILO.* This is the traditional method of booting and lets you boot both Linux and other operating systems.
• Use the Grand Unified Bootloader (GRUB), the GNU graphical boot loader and command shell. Like LILO, GRUB lets you boot both Linux and other operating systems. For now, GRUB runs only on i386-based systems.
• Run Loadlin, which is an MS-DOS program that boots Linux from within DOS.

Other boot managers that can load Linux are available, but we don’t discuss them here. We also won’t talk further about booting from a floppy or CD or via Loadlin, except to say that whatever method you choose for booting, be sure to have a working boot disk available for emergency use. In particular, don’t experiment with the files and options in this chapter unless you have a boot disk, because any error could leave you unable to boot from the hard disk. Note, is called MILO (Mini Loader), and on the SPARC, it’s called SILO.though, that one of the advantages of using GRUB is that if there is a problem booting from the menu, it drops you down to the command-line interface so you can enter commands directly and try to recover. Also, see "Creating a GRUB boot floppy," later in this chapter, for information on making a GRUB boot floppy.*

* LILO is a boot program for i386-architecture machines. On the Alpha, the equivalent boot program

The Boot Process

On an x86-based PC, the first sector of every hard disk is known as the boot sector and contains the partition table for that disk and possibly also code for booting an operating system. The boot sector of the first hard disk is known as the master boot record (MBR), because when you boot the system, the BIOS transfers control to a program that lives on that sector along with the partition table. That code is the boot loader, the code that initiates an operating system. When you add Linux to the system, you need to modify the boot loader, replace it, or boot from a floppy or CD to start Linux.

In Linux, each disk and each partition on the disk is treated as a device. For example, the entire first hard disk is known as /dev/hda, and the entire second hard disk is /dev/hdb. The first partition of the first hard drive is /dev/hda1, and the second partition is /dev/hda2. The first partition of the second hard drive is /dev/hdb1, and so on. If your drives are SCSI instead of IDE, the naming works the same way, except that the devices are /dev/sda, /dev/sda1, and so on. Thus, if you want to specify that the Linux partition is the second partition of the first hard drive (as in the examples in this chapter), you refer to it as /dev/hda2. Note, though, that GRUB has its own disk naming convention, described later in this chapter in "GRUB: The Grand Unified Bootloader."

Once you’ve made the decision to install LILO or GRUB, you still need to decide how it should be configured. If you want your system to dual-boot Linux and Windows 95/98/ME, you can install LILO or GRUB on the MBR and set it up to let you select the system to boot. Dual-booting Linux and Windows NT/2000/XP is not quite as straightforward because these systems use the Windows NT loader, which is installed on the MBR and expects to be in charge. The standard solution described in this chapter is to add Linux as an option in the NT loader and install LILO or GRUB in the Linux partition as a secondary boot loader. The result is that the NT loader transfers control to the secondary loader, which then boots Linux. See "Dual-Booting Linux and Windows NT/2000/XP," later in this chapter, for more information. You can also install one of the Linux boot loaders in the MBR and use it to boot Windows. (See the "Linux+WindowsNT" and the "Multiboot with GRUB" mini-HOWTOs if you’re interested in doing that.)

When you install the boot loader (either LILO or GRUB) on the MBR, it replaces the MS-DOS boot loader or any other boot loader that may be there, such as the Windows NT loader. If you have problems with your installation or you simply want to restore the original boot loader, you can do one of the following:

* Unfortunately, there is no standard set of instructions we can provide for making a bootable CD.

Your best bet is to use a bootable installation CD for your distribution. Also, instructions and utilities are available online for making bootable CDs.• If you’re running LILO, you can boot Linux from a floppy or CD and restore the boot sector, which LILO automatically backs up:

$ /sbin/lilo –u

• If you have the capability, boot to DOS and run the fdisk command with a
special option that rebuilds the MBR:

C:> fdisk /mbr

Customer Reviews

Probably more suited to Intermediate/Advanced users
I've just started using Linux (Fedora 7) and I was looking for a book that would help me learn the commands and how to do the more tricky things in Linux. The commands in the book are arranged alphabetically, which is not much good if you do no know the command in the first place i.e. if you want to know how to delete a directory you are going to have to know the 'rm' command before being able to jump to the right page in the book. For beginners this isn't recommended (get the Linux Essential Commands Pocket Guide instead) but if you're intermediate/advanced then this is a good book. I've no doubt that I'll refer back to this book in 3/4 months or so but at the moment I won't be using it much.

A starter for all
I found this book to be extremely useful. It greatly improved my understanding of how Linux works and, more importantly, how to use the command line - which is very powerful. It also helped me understand the directory structuring, enabling me to find files that I needed to configure, and these files have been consistantly in the same place with the Distros I have used to date.

Excellent!

A printed collection of manpages
80% of this book is a collection of printed man-pages, ordered alphabetically, with no major improvements or added value. The only useful informations on this book is the index of commonly used commands, sorted by topic; and a few introductory chapters.

If you prefer reading on paper and have a few bucks to spend, buy this book. Otherwise, stick on the good old man pages; often more accurate, up-to-date, and "grep-able"... And conveniently located on your screen, where you need it the most. Typing man is always faster than getting the book from the bookshelf, open the index and finally find the page.

Believe me, I own the book, I never use it. Internet + man are your best friends.