Planet TLLTS

Practical Guide to Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, A (5th Edition)

Wow. Mark Sobell hits another one out of the park.

Comprehensive can hardly describe this book, although I am hard pressed to come up with a more appropriate word. This massive volume covers all things Fedora and Redhat, from the common to the esoteric, but do not be daunt about the amount of information there. In true Sobell fashion, each topic is explained thoroughly in a manner that could easily be used to teach a novice with. In fact, in the review quote on the front cover, Eric Hartwell says the same. This book is a keeper and its pages will surely be well thumbed, at least until the next revision comes out!

The Walking Dead

All work and no play makes Linc a dull boy, right? Well, I thought it was about time to touch on one or two things outside the linux/technical arena. One of these things is the “The Walking Dead” series. This is a comic series that I was introduced to by Dann Washko after he an the other guys from the TechShow finally convinced me to read the Graphic Novel “The Watchmen”, which, by the way, is also on my bookshelf.

I am a big horror movie fan from way, way back and have all the required George Romero movies nearby and handy on dvd. These comics, now bound in “graphic novel volumes” up through 10 right now, are a fantastic extension to my zombie movie collection. Not only that, but these graphic novels are really really good in their own right. The story is great, the character development is fantastic and the artwork is really top notch. If every graphic novel was as good as these, I would have a room full of them.

So, if you are a graphic novel/comic fan or even a horror/zombie fan, this is something you just have to get a hold of.

The Official Ubuntu Server Book

Ahh, these are the kinds of books I really dig. As a systems administrator, I love to get books that detail setting up servers and services and this is exactly what this covers for Ubuntu. Here you can learn about things from what bind is and how to get it working to kickstarting, raid and a plethora of other server topics. Great reference material here, especially for those people who are thinking they want to get a server set up at home. You just can’t go wrong with this one.

Pro Ubuntu Server Administration

If you were going to really really get into Ubuntu server administration you would want this book, probably to go along with the Official Ubuntu Server book. Like the title suggests, this book is intended for those people who are in up to their neck in serious admin tasks. This book covers things like getting Nagios running so you can monitor things better, server performance analysis, iSCSI, LDAP and even a smattering of VPN. It’s the stuff the big boys play with, and it’s a great reference and tool for those kind of tasks on Ubuntu servers. I try and make it a policy to pass a lot of my books along so they can also benefit other people, but this one stays put on my bookshelf. I am keeping it

The Official Ubuntu Book

For Ubuntu users, this one is a real gem. This is your “soup to nuts” type good starter book for Ubuntu users. It is great reference material for everything from the history and idea behind the Ubuntu distribution to more advanced topics like using Ubuntu as a server and even touches on different offshoots of Ubuntu like Kubuntu and Edubuntu. What will really make a difference to a newer Ubuntu user (or just a new Linux user) is the sections of this book which give detailed instructions on how to use different available pieces of software to accomplish tasks like getting your email going, drawing pictures with Gimp, finding your files and so fourth. There is also a great section of the book dealing with common issues and troubleshooting problems like fixing an incorrect screen resolution.

A Practical Guide to Ubuntu Linux

As great an Ubuntu book as the last one is for the desktop Ubuntu user, this one is that and more of it! Even though this book is for a little older version of Ubuntu, the information in it is absolutely expansive. If you cannot find a reference in here on how to get a certain task accomplished, I would really be surprised This book goes through the general information like setup and install like most books do, and then gives you HUNDREDS of examples of how to get things done with your Ubuntu install. It’s really a pretty great book, and the one that I am going to pass on to a new Ubuntu user friend of mine.

I mentioned that I was going to take this opportunity to explote my bookshelf a little bit since my *play* laptop’s screen bit it again. I figure I’ll call this the “What’s on your bookshelf” series. I’ll try and give some general reviews about what’s on my personal bookshelf and why and I’ll try and keep things relatively short because AI have quite a few books to go through and, well, I don’t want to bore either one of us

Building a monitoring infrastructure with Nagios

The first book that gets a mention is Building a monitoring infrastructure with Nagios. This is one of the books that I have that is really quite well worn. I do some Nagios administration at work and more recently at home. This book has been invaluable to not only me but several of my colleagues at work too.

Configuring Nagios is certainly not for the faint at heart and I have used Chapter 4’s Configuring Nagios information a LOT. Not to mention the command line options on Appendix C and the review of best practices. It’s been quite handy to have some direction right at my fingertips with some of this, and it’s didn’t hurt to have something to throw as a stress reliever on occasion too

Really, get this book if you are going to delve into Nagios - you’ll be happy that you did.

Getting things done - The art of stress-free productivity

This *LOOKS* like a fantastic book. It was recommended to me by a plethora of people, obviously one of those power self-help kind of books that everyone on the planet has read but me. I actually borrowed this from my boss some months ago and, just to prove how much I really need to read it, I have not yet had the time to do so.

I need to get this onto my short list of things to do, but I am curious as to what others actually do think of it. If you have read it, make sure to drop a comment and let me know the parts in there I really need to pay attention to!

Wow! What a weekend!

We had a great time again this year, no surprise. It’s always great to be able to hang out with all your friends and all you linux folk and TechShow listeners are my friends!

My thoughts are still a bit disjointed from the weekend so here are some random notes about OLF this year:

Special thanks to Richard Querin and Mordancy for the new logo and t-shirts. They were fan-freaking-tastic! We took small donations in exchange for a TLLTS t-shirt this year and that provided us with enough money to pay some of the booth and bandwidth fees and get a good head start on getting some more shirts for next year’s festivities.

Prentice Hall, Neuros Tech, Oreilly and APress deserve BIG thank you’s for once again sponsoring us with some excellent giveaways for our free raffle this year.

This weekend was the start if our 7th broadcast year on the TechShow and I am still consistently amazed when someone walks up to me, recognizes me and tells me they listen to the show!

I saw Ubuntu’s netbook remix v 9.10 boot from bios to full desktop in 4 seconds while I was there. Astounding!

Oracle has this python sql interface that they are working on that is probably one of the coolest things, as a developer, that I have seen in a long time. It’s like stuffing bash into the sql command line. Nifty things like colored columned table listings, easy piping from sql command line to bash commands and files. This was some seriously cool stuff. I can’t wait for them to get it working with not only orcacle but mysql and postgres too!

This year was definitely the year of the netbook. It seems like everyone had one, they were all constantly using them, they all loved their netbook and anyone who didn’t yet have one was dying to get one. I must have seen hundreds of them this weekend and they were all running Linux except one.

The one netbook that wasn’t running Linux was at the booth right next to ours. They were the guys from Haiku, the new BeOS implementation. This is some seriously neat stuff and these guys are to be commended. While not ready for primetime just yet, they are going that direction full force and have some really slick stuff going in their favor. This OS is FAST man. I saw an average netbook doing some AMAZING video rendering feats like playing high def movies while running 3D video demos at 700fps and the thing wasn’t even breaking a sweat. There was another old thinkpad laptop playing 5 different videos at the same time with no lag whatsoever. I Bet it won’t Be long Before this OS has the full attention of, at least, some video processing nuts! You can bet I’ll be keeping an eye on this one.

There are a few things I will do differently next year, mostly with my time management, like getting there a day earlier, but I had a great time. If you haven’t been to one yet, make sure you go because you are missing out. Put it on your calendar for next year. I’ll see ya there!