Re: Good books

[John Foster <jfoster@augustmail.com>]

"..." wrote:
> 
>      I'm a total newbie with linux. I downloaded Debian, and put it on my
> second hard drive, total capacity about 435 meg. I partitioned it to
> reserve 100 meg for dos, 
-------------------------------------
Will you be using DOS applications. If Not you don't need a DOS
partition. If you are using DOS for games or some other needs the
partition proportions you have are about right if you have at least 32
Mb of ram in this system. If you are using less ram you will likely need
about 64 Mb of swap drive space, especially if you are planing to use
StarOffice 5.1 and Netscape 6.1 from the Netscape website. These are
both memory hogs but in my opinion well worth the space.


put about 10% of the remainder aside for swap,
> and the rest is for linux.
>      This being kind of small, when I installed Debian, I just installed
> the Standard package, Dialup, and Small XWindows.
>      The "man" command doens't appear to be active, and the /usr/doc files
> don't have a lot of information. Most of it seems to be changelog and
> copyright, so I'm thinking of deleting all of it.
----------------------------------------------
 I may get some argument from others, but I would leave ALL of the
installation files alone. If not you WILL HAVE some installation
dependencies that will show up later especially if you use dpkg, dselect
to remove some of the progs that you installed. I have experienced this!
BTW: I agree that we should be able to remove these without upsetting
Debian's delicate balance.

>       What sort of how-to books would be helpful? I'd like the equivalent
> of the old Understanding MSDOS and Supercharging MSDOS books, published
> by QUE, I think. 
-------------------------------------------------------
I highly recommend "Running Linux" by O'Reilly & Associates. I have the
2nd edition and hope they release the 3rd edition soon as it needs
updating. The value is that you can learn how to set up your system any
way you want it from this primer, as it is a good LINUX tutorial,
without being specefic to Debian. Using it will teach you to be the
master of any system, be it SUSE, RedHat, Debian , or just taking the
bull by the horns and doing raw installs from GNU stuff, right off the
rack.
-------------------------------------------------------
I want to learn how to get a color screen at the root
> level, set up and optimize FSTAB, and ultimately, if I have enough with
> the system I've got, to install and use Netscape for UNIX and STAR Office.
--------------------------------------------------------
Good Luck and welcome to the adventures of open source software. 
-- 
John Foster
AdVance-Computing Systems
jfoster@augustmail.com
ICQ# 19460173