Linux in a Nutshell, 6th Edition

What This Book Offers

Originally based on the classic O’Reilly quick reference, Unix in a Nutshell, this book has been expanded to include much information that is specific to Linux. These enhancements include chapters on:

• Package managers (which make it easy to install, update, and remove related software files)

• Boot methods

• The Subversion and Git version control systems

• Virtualization

The book also contains dozens of Linux-specific commands, along with tried-and-true Unix commands that have been supporting users for decades (though they continue to sprout new options).

This book does not cover the graphical tools contained in most distributions of Linux. Many of these, to be sure, are quite useful and can form the basis of everyday work. Examples of these tools include OpenOffice (Sun Microsystems’ free, open source version of the StarOffice suite), Evolution (a mail, calendar, and office productivity tool from Novell), Firefox and Thunderbird (a browser and mail program from Mozilla), and the GIMP (a graphic image-manipulation program and provider of a powerful library used by the GNOME project). But they are not Linux-specific, and their graphical models do not fit well into the format of this book.

While you probably log in to one of the graphical desktop environments such as GNOME or KDE and do much of your work with the graphical applications, the core of Linux use is the text manipulation and administration done from the command line, within scripts, or using text editors such ...