Book Review: Linux Starter Kit, by Emmett Dulaney

Reviewed by Peter H. Salus

In general, I hate packaging. I used to think of Christmas as that time of year when every father in North America drove a large copper staple into his thumb while trying to open a carton containing a large toy.

Where the Linux Starter Kit was concerned, it took me longer to open the several layers of cellophane and shrink-wrap than it took me to mount the DVD on an old Dell laptop (running XP) and see a familiar Gnome footprint.

In all likelihood, all readers of Groklaw are already running Linux or OS X or one of the BSDs. But it is equally likely that you've got a relative or friend you'd like to "convert" from the creations of M$. This Starter Kit is a good way to do it.

The DVD contains "SUSE LINUX 10.1" and a "Reference Manual." This latter is 650 pages of searchable PDFs. The book (or booklet) contains materials for "Installation," "Linux Basics," and "Troubleshooting."

But whoever had the idea for this, had a good one. While I am still a fan of Marcel Gagne's Moving to Linux: Kiss the Blue Screen of Death Goodbye! (second ed., 2005), which comes with a Knoppix CD-ROM, the Kit's SUSE certainly surpasses Knoppix. Moreover, SUSE 10.1 comes with Firefox, OpenOffice and both KDE and Gnome.

However, SUSE 10.1 is far from the retail SUSE Linux sold by Novell. Among other things, it lacks numerous plug-ins. All these are easily downloadable, but I thought that newbies would want to avoid that sort of thing.

But there are drawbacks. I'm not sure that the extremely terse booklet is really suitable where chapters 4 (on YaST) and 5 (on files and filesystems) are concerned. I think a true beginner will feel both frustrated and at sea if attempting to follow these.

Finally, there's no clearly outlined road ahead: if the newbie want to install the full Novell distribution, it's not an add-on: she/he will have to reinstall from scratch.

In short, Linux Starter Kit offers the M$ user a good route to ease into Linux. But it isn't effortless, nor does it yield the convert a clear way to go "whole hog." The Starter Kit is a good idea at a reasonable price. The next version should be even better.

Dr. Salus is the author of "A Quarter Century of UNIX" (which you can obtain here, here, here and here) and several other books, including "HPL: Little Languages and Tools", "Big Book of Ipv6 Addressing Rfcs", "Handbook of Programming Languages (HPL): Imperative Programming Languages", "Casting the Net: From ARPANET to INTERNET and Beyond", and "The Handbook of Programming Languages (HPL): Functional, Concurrent and Logic Programming Languages". There is an interview with him, audio and video,"codebytes: A History of UNIX and UNIX Licences" which was done in 2001 at a USENIX conference. Dr. Salus has served as Executive Director of the USENIX Association.

This work is copyrighted by Peter H. Salus, and is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 559 Nathan Abbott Way, Stanford, California 94305, USA.