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• Linux Desktop Garage
  Susan Matteson - Prentice Hall  Professional Technical Series
  Review by Clint Tinsley

• Prentice Hall PTR has started a book selection call the Garage Series which you can find out more about on their web site and be sure to read to end of this review for the frosting on the cake.   PTR is an abbreviation for Professional Technical Reference of which some of these books fall into but the Linux Desktop Garage is clearly targeted at the new Linux Desktop user.  The premise of the Garage Series is “I do my best work in the garage” but it is also a place where one tinkers…
  
  Susan Matteson has a unique style, sometimes self-deprecating, sometimes off-the-wall, sometimes nonsensical, but always easy reading except for the part where you wonder what she said because it seems to made absolutely no sense.  She starts off her book by saying that “This book is full of self-help tips that will regrow your thinning hair, help you loose weight, make you money in on the real estate market  … Why this book is one great big late night TV infomercial.  I’m lying.  I do that.  You’ll learn.”
  
  First off, let me say this book, at under 400 pages, is not “big” and it is light enjoyable reading that gets you started using the Linux Desktop, hands-on. Susan fills the gap in the hands-on area where so many books that try to teach you Linux are highly technical but at the same time leaving you to fill in the details. Susan fills in the details by taking you through a simple hands-on exercise that gets you immediately down and dirty (or is that greasy?) with the activity.  As an example, rather than just showing you how to start up the Gimp photo editing program and a quick look at a screen shot of the application, she takes you through an exercise consisting of three files where you layer two graphics over a background and she even provides the files for the exercise from her website at http://www.snerf.com/linuxdesktopgarage.  If you don’t like doing all that typing, simply go to www.snerf.com and click on the Susan link (it’s the left dark blue button under the graphic; all snerfs take on a bluish hue…)  From there, just follow the Linux Desktop Garage link.
  
  The book is very well organized beginning with Chapter 1 “What Are You Getting Into?”  Here you will find all you need to know, good and bad, mostly good, about getting started with Linux. On page 2 of the chapter, you’ll find the “The Slick Sales Guy” and read things like “How much would you pay now?” in the vein of the kitchen utensil commercial on TV where they keep making it a better deal.  As we know, Linux is free, and according to the Slick Sales text “even comes with free candy.” Okay, Susan stretches the truth a little.  In chapter 1, you’ll not only get familiar with the terminology but by page 37, you can have Linux installed with a complete walkthrough of both the Fedora and Mandrake installation process.  On page 37, you will find links to resources mentioned in the chapter.
  
  Susan’s links at the end of each chapter are awesome and this extends to her website “chapter links” found at the desktop garage website.  I have her chapter links website bookmarked as there are resources there I have not seen before and they are organized by chapter, which may be a reason for buying the book, if just for the chapter links!
  
  You cannot call this book boring or a dry read.  Susan uses a variety of styles from notes on the Fridge, to toolkits that walk you through steps of doing some task, giving you the “skinny” on what she is writing including program comparisons, taking you “Under the Hood” with footnotes and just lots of good information.
  
  About the only fault that I find with the book is the choice of Gnoppix/Ubunto as the Live CD for the book.  The two major issues with the Gnoppix Live CD is that is it is purely gnome based where her book focuses on both the gnome and KDE desktops. Secondly, the Gnoppix Live CD is basically a road to nowhere as it doesn’t provide for installation.  Gnoppix/Ubunto is Debian based. There are other Debian based Live CD’s out there such as Knoppix, which is very popular, and SimplyMepis that is nothing short of awesome. SimplyMepis also comes with a easy-to-use desktop installer which includes partitioning utilities if you want Linux to coexist with Windows as a dual boot.
  
  Like Susan, I lie too; there is one other fault I find with the book and that is her choice of distributions. In the book,  she focuses on Fedora (RedHat) and Mandrake.  Of the two, only Fedora is freely available for downloading.  Fedora is a complete distribution (4 CD’s) which is easy to install and well supported, updates occur almost daily and are easily obtained, if not automatically.  Mandrake’s future is very cloudy as they had a close brush with bankrupcy a year or so back and they are tinkering with their distribution model.  Mandrake just announced that they are going to an annual release model and there will be no retail boxed product this year. The only way to get Mandrake is from Mandrake and you must pay to join their club to get it!
  
  I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in using Linux and becoming a master mechanic in the garage.  Even if you bought Point & Click Linux which I reviewed a couple months back, this book is a nice addition to your desktop and complements well what you might have learned in Point & Click as you get “under the hood” in the Garage with Susan.
  
  I invite you to visit Prentice Hall's Garageseries website to learn more about this book and others in the garage series and now the frosting on the cake:  Prentice Hall PTR is offering user group members a 30% discount on the garageseries books which you can obtain by going here.

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