Chapter 3 : Introduction

Welcome, and thank you for using Linux-Mandrake! This book is divided into two parts: a User Guide and a Reference manual. The User Guide will help you use your Linux-Mandrake system on a daily basis, and the Reference manual will allow you to go further. Here is a summary for each of these two parts:

User Guide

The first chapter is purposedly biased towards the people among you who have already used Windows. Linux, is above all, a Unix system, which possesses fundamental differences from other operating systems you may be familiar with. Many new concepts will be highlighted in this chapter.

The second chapter is entirely dedicated to the use of KDE, the default graphical environment of Linux-Mandrake. You will see that it is a real working environment, very intuitive and fully configurable. You will probably be pleasantly surprised by what it can do.

You will then find four chapters dedicated to system configuration, covering the following subjects: configuring an Internet connection by modem, managing users, managing software packages and configuring your hardware with a brand new tool: Lothar.

Then you will learn how to control processes. Applications may sometimes behave badly and you will need to terminate them, this chapter tells you how.

The final section is devoted to documentation. In addition to introducing documentation you have available on your Linux system, some useful links on the Internet are provided.

Reference manual

The Reference Manual goes further into the system and begins with a chapter dedicated to the command line. Described here are standard utilities for manipulating files and also some useful functions provided by the shell.

A chapter is dedicated to text editing. As most Unix configuration files are text, you may need to edit them in a text editor. You will learn how to use two of the most famous text editors in the Unix world: the mighty Emacs and the modern VI.

Then you will see how the file tree is organized. Unix systems tend to grow very large, but every file has its own place in a specific directory. After reading this chapter you will know where to look for files depending on its role in the system.

A chapter will be dedicated to the Linux filesystem ext2fs. Here you will learn about file types and some additional concepts that may be new to you. Another chapter will introduce the special Linux filesystem /proc.

Three chapters follow which introduce useful tools: Samba, for sharing files and printers with Windows machines; MSEC, to manage the security of your Linux-Mandrake system; and Auto Install, which allows you to save your installation parameters for future use.

You will then learn about the Linux-Mandrake bootup procedure, and how to use it efficiently.

Another section covers the topic of filesystems and mount points. Here you will learn what both of these terms mean and be shown a practical example.

The final chapter will describe how to compile and install a new kernel.

You will also want to refer to the Appendix which contains three additional chapters. The first is dedicated to building and installing free software. The second chapter introduces yet another set of command line utilities. The final chapter contains a guide to installing Linux-Mandrake using the text-mode option.

Part I : User Guide