Linux Cookbook, 2nd Edition

Preface

Way back in olden times I wrote the first edition of the Linux Cookbook, which was released unto a joyous world in 2004. It sold well, I heard from many happy readers, and some are still my friends.

For a Linux book, 17 years old is ancient. Linux was 14 years old in 2004, a wee baby computer operating system. Even so, it was already a popular and widely used powerhouse, adapting to any role, from tiny embedded devices to mainframes and supercomputers. The rapid growth of Linux is partly due to it being a free clone of Unix, the most mature and powerful operating system of all. The other major factor in the speedy growth and adoption of Linux is the absence of barriers. Anyone can download and try it, and the source code is freely available to anyone who wants to use and contribute to it.

At the time it was a great example of form following function, like my first car. It ran, it was reliable, but it wasn’t pretty, and it needed a lot of custom wiggling of this and jiggling of that to keep going. Running a Linux system back then meant learning your way around a hodgepodge of commands, scripts, and configuration files, and a fair bit of wiggling and jiggling. Software management, storage management, networking, audio, video, kernel management, process management…everything required a lot of hands-on work and continual study.

Some 17 years later, every important subsystem in Linux has substantially changed and improved. Now all those manual chores we had to do for basic ...