An essay on linux and a book request
 

Linux is complex beast on the surface of things and I have found it to be a rather long learning curve coming to terms with the system. Using Microsoft for many years I have become used to program file directories, registries, system files in the root and so on. Things over there are reasonably easy to troubleshoot.

Then comes time to take a look at linux. And after 3 years of it, I still consider myself very much a beginner. Why? Mainly due to the fact that after learning how to set up samba servers, installing software with rpm, or compiling software and kernels, there will always be an issue that dogs you.

You may feel that you know so much, you decide to do something different like getting sound working on a linux laptop. Suddenly you're faced with all kinds of new issues. Drivers don't load in the right order. /dev/dsp gets lost on every second reboot. Then one day you finally get it all working. You're not sure how it worked but it does work on one user account, but not the other. So you leave it. It works in a fashion.

Then you decide to get a modem installed which you manage to do, but the kppp can't detect the modem, and if it does, if doesn't on the next boot.

Remember the days of the Amiga? I know many of us do. They were the good days when systems were tightly built and hardware just worked. Granted, there was one set of hardware which is not the case anymore. Systems became more complex and hardware had to run on a whole range of different systems. But in the Amiga days you knew what was going on. Remember the startup-sequence and user-startup files? You put everything in there and stuff loaded on boot for you. It was simple to do.

As the Amiga became more complex with different monitors and devices, and so forth, there were special directories for these things. And everything worked with little complication. They were good days gone forever and I doubt we'll see anything like it again.

Then there's linux. A black box full of crypic magic.

Yet, a great system built by many minds from a global community. And on the surface I have seen it as so very complex for a long time. And I doubt it will get any simpler. However, that said, every file sits in a certain place and does a certain job for a reason. Most of us have a rough idea of what the jobs of the files and file locations are for.

For example: /etc contains system level configurations files, while /home/ is for user level configuration. /etc/rc.d contains our startup scripts just like startup-sequence did in the old Amiga days, yet many of us have so much trouble getting custom things to load for us on startup. We have so much trouble changing or adding all sorts of things. USB comes to mind as a good example.

Every distribution comes with GUI configuration tools in one form or another for particular parts of the system. For instance, the redhat network config gui tool is a very handy thing indeed. However, I can only work out a few of the files that it alters.

Now all this being said, and here is my question... who can recommend a book that educates on the core workings of linux? One that discusses how linux processes it's startup files, it's modules, and generally what's going on under the hood? I don't believe that linux will get much simpler without the wide adoption of a common linux base and gui tools to go with it.
Therefore, the only way I can possibly be able to troubleshoot all aspect of the system is to become totally intimate with each and every aspect on a low level.

Thanks for reading and excuse my ignorance on several points. I hope there is such a book or books out there that someone can recommend.

Wayne Johnson

Have you tried
http://www.icon.co.za/~psheer/book/index.html.gz

It has a lot of useful info and just might have what you are looking for.

What a brilliant document! Thanks so much. Many weeks reading here and it will be worth it. Tried to hit that rating link of yours but it appears to be stuffed.

Hey, your spam post from the 'buy a research paper site' has been reported. And why would anyone want to buy a paper from someone who uses text-speak, and has bad grammar?

Anyway that book site doesn't exist any more. If you try the link, it changes to new.mweb.co.za followed by a "server not found" error. Which indicates a more general problem: a lot of old threads like this contain links that were once useful but are now dead. There should be some way of weeding them out.

Good post OP - I admit I had to laugh because I have been using Linux as my desktop for 20 years. I despise windows for its complexity: it is over engineered and massively complex. I have exactly the opposite perspective as you: I believe Linux is very simple in terms of directory structure and configuration, while I feel windows is exactly the opposite.

I think TB0ne was speaking about link in post #4, not #2 that indeed redirects to http://new.mweb.co.za/ now ;)
However, you're right in substance: links can eventually get dead.

Until the spammer reopened this thread, it had been closed for FOURTEEN YEARS. Not surprised there are dead links.

Oh my, did not even notice the OP was from 2004.

I got to the word "modem" and then I checked the date.

I checked what the missing link was. It was the Rute book.

One current link is here:

https://rlworkman.net/howtos/rute/

That's a marvellous book.