The Free World: ODOS - LNAG
Today’s ODOS site is the Linux Newbie Administrator Guide.
Here at New Linux User, I tend to focus on home or desktop users rather than server or administrator users. The reason for this is two fold. For starters, I think your average home user is more likely to have less training and less money than the average employed Linux server guy who has a book budget and some training (hopefully). The second reason is that other than a 6-month stint running a Debian server in my basement, I don’t know squat about administering a GNU/Linux box.
So, normally I wouldn’t blog about an administrator guide, but the LNAG is so good that it really deserves to be talked about. Granted I didn’t take three months to read the whole thing, but I took a run through the basics and some of the philosophies and it seems quite sound. The instruction has a conversational tone to it which is a welcome respite from the deadpan-drowing-in-boredom voice of some GNU/Linux articles I’ve been subjected to.
Both the newer GRUB and the older LILO are boot loaders. They make it possible for you to select the operating system to boot at the boot time. Most (all?) of the booting problems described in this section can likely be overcome by installing the most recent Linux kernel and the latest GRUB boot loader. GRUB is better than LILO because LILO relies on the absolute hard drive addresses to find the boot image, while GRUB understands the filesystems and looks for a file containing the boot image. We recommend using GRUB when given a choice during the installation.
I didn’t know that. I knew from trying different distros that GRUB seemed to be more popular, but I didn’t know why. There’s lots of gems hidden away in the LNAG.
Link to the Linux Newbie Administrator Guide.
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2 opinions for The Free World: ODOS - LNAG
Ganesh
Jan 23, 2006 at 12:45 pm
Yup…there can be no doubt that its simply of the best newbie guides out there…I used it myself when i was getting onto the linux bandwagon and found the language and presentation of ideas simple and easy to comprehend.
Jon
Jan 23, 2006 at 1:04 pm
Agreed. I quite enjoyed the bits that I read.
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