Good LINUX/ Fedora Reference Books????

[Chris Negus]

Hi John,
On Mon, 2005-07-18 at 20:54 -0500, John Best wrote: 
> All,
> Looking for some good reference/administration books for Fedora FC4 or
> other General Fedora Info.  I find I can hack my way through most
> problems, but the MAN pages are very poor at providing education on what
> features or tools are available and how to get started with them. 

Here are a few:

Red Hat Fedora and Enterprise Linux 4 Bible, by Chris Negus 
    (just hitting bookstores)
Practical Guide to Red Hat Linux, by Mark Sobell
Red Hat Fedora 4 Unleashed, by Hudson, Hudson, Ball and Duff

IMHO, the Bible keeps up better with the latest information. Sobell did
a nice job, but it's based on FC2. Haven't seen FC4 Unleashed yet.
(Disclaimer: I wrote the first one so my opinions may be biased.)

> Things I want to find out/become better educated...
> SELinux - how to configure/administrate.  (I think I have some inet
> services - portmapper/others that start but error out - see errors on
> boot - that I would like to correct correctly. 
Bible has a chapter on SELinux. Could be deeper, but a good start. Not
covered in the other two books.

> Admin web and related services like mysql, webserver, mail server,
> firewall, etc.
All covered in the Bible. No real coverage on firewalls in Unleashed.
Good coverage in Sobell's book.

> Understand and can use logging - Where are the logs, how to monitor the
> logs, how to log more/less..
Fedora dropped system-logviewer in FC4. Bible added coverage of logwatch.
Otherwise, page through files in /var/log, I guess.

> How to configure the gnome/kde menus/start menus, etc (This to me is the
> most frustrating and difficult activity I have tried to hack through.)
For GNOME, copy and edit a .desktop file in /usr/share/applications. For
KDE, right-click the panel->Configure Panel->Menus->Edit K Menu. (There,
now you don't have to buy a book. ;-) )

-- Chris Negus