Hello,
Longtime windoze user (because work, gaming, programming, lazybess, …) I’m switching over to Linux Mint (a slow long process that might finally end up with just a little win-box for the printer and a soft or two) on all my everyday pc:s so I’m trying to get more into the nitty gritty stuff here, and I have long time heard that the:
UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook (4th Edition)
Is like the Linux Bible…
Is it still so? Is it still worth the money or are there better books out there?
Cheers!
Honestly, it depends on what you’re trying to do with your machines. If you are looking for a stable desktop environment, you don’t need to dive that deep. (At least, to start.) Just install the defaults, and read a basic tutorial on using the Bash shell. (Even if you move away from bash, lots of scripts and such use it by default, so a passing familiarity is highly recommended.) Especially learn about installing programs with the package manager. (‘apt-get’ for Mint and other Debian-based distros.) The defaults are gonna be generally sane, especially in Mint. If you want to get into deeper waters from there, you’ll have a stable base to start from.
But. If you want to configure your machine, top to bottom and really understand how Linux works… Install Arch. Not even joking. Arch installation docs are very detailed and walk you through setting up every part of your Linux system. Be prepared for your first time to take a few days to complete. It’s a lot to take in. Start with a computer you can leave offline for awhile.
I learned a ton by installing Arch. And then I went back to Debian-based distros because there was less active maintenance. (Note that this was over a decade ago, so things may be better now. YMMV). This is definitely Learning The Hard Way, but it’s honestly the most effective thing I can think of.
Linux is insanely customizable. You can swap out and/or customize pretty much every aspect of it. It can be overwhelming. I recommend taking things on a bit at a time, but I’ve rarely used software that’s as easy to find free support for.
Welcome to the party!
Ha ha thanks 😊 party time 🥳🎉 !
I’m sort of in between I guess, I’m a senior dev and I mean I get to it when needed like doing that vi ~/.bashrc for an env var (and ~/.bashrc to (re)load it right?), fixing some script or installing “stuff” or so.
Server soft I write is usually for Linux, the rest on Wind. But I also decided to switch my daily driver over and I have a curious mind so if I can’t sleep I’d love to have some big good old book to check out for ‘stuff’ I do not yet know!
Maybe you’re right and I should go on and install everything from scratch (that’s it with Arch right, of am I messing it up with some more bare metal install? A colleague did that compile install everything once a bunch of years ago, he spoke about it for weeks :-).
Gentoo is the og, “Linux from scratch” distro, where you compile everything yourself. Arch is kinda like that, except everything is compiled already. 😁
You still select all the parts of your Linux system, from the desktop environment (if any) all the way down to which initialization system you want to use. Along the way, you’ll dive into a lot of the various text files Linux uses for configuration and learn which files live where.
It’s a very thorough dive!
If you’re looking for reading material about Linux though, I don’t really have any books to recommend offhand… I will say that the basic tooling in Linux, the POSIX-standard stuff, like grep, vi, sed, and so forth remains mostly unchanged (at least in all the important ways) from year to year. Some of it has remained essentially the same since the seventies, so even a six year old book will still be able to cover all of that just fine.
The things that it would not be good for would be some of the more recent developments in, say, UI tech, like the slow, but ongoing migration from X to Wayland.
Command line scripts and config files are likely to largely be the same (though a few files have a tendency to move around depending on the distro).
Tools for administration outside of the venerable POSIX tooling is gonna be a crapshoot in book-form. Still, it’ll give you a place to start from!