Linux Toys: 13 Cool Projects for Home, Office and Entertainment
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Spotlight Customer Reviews
Average Customer Rating: 4.17Customer Rating: 2
Summary: Disappointed
Comment: I wish I'd found this book at a retail store where I could have looked at it before I payed for it. I guess I have two complaints with this book.
The first (bigger) complaint stems from that adage that if you give a guy a fish, he can eat for a day, but if you teach him to fish, he can eat for the rest of his life. I really hoped this book would be more of a how-to approach on how to get the software going. Instead, it came with a CD with an RPM for every project and simple instructions. Most of the projects seemed like nothing more than: "Start with an Athlon 1.8GHz with a half gig of RAM and a big hard drive, install the entire linux distribution of your choice, then run the RPM on the CD in the book. You're done! Now go play!" I was really hoping to see more explanation of what was going on in the guts of the software, and a more minimalist approach to the software and hardware requirements. I can find anything I want on the internet for "build this kernel, re-compile those binaries, and edit the files in /etc to make it work". More often than not, though, most of the stuff on the internet is beyond what most folks that have been using windows all along and are trying to make sense of the internals of Linux are capable of understanding. Unfortunately, this text makes a poor stepping-stone for the newbie to get a good start on learning HOW LINUX WORKS.
My other issue goes back to what I mentioned in the previous paragraph about what I felt were frequently over-the-top hardware requirements. I'd hoped I'd be able to employ my old Pentium III with a 12-GB disk and 256 MB of RAM for some of the projects. Unfortunately, most of the projects were calling for a brand-new machine. For instance, if I recall correctly, the video recorder project asked for hardware that would probably end up costing in excess of $800. Are you kidding me? I'll just keep using my VCR, thus saving me the cost of having to buy a TiVo and pay for the monthly service.
Anyone interested in buying my book? Send me an email.
Customer Rating: 5
Summary: Linux Toys: 13 Cool Projects
Comment: Well, I am really serious about linux. My career is lowering TCO for small to medium businesses by rolling their M$ servers over to *nix solutions. (Yeah people actually do it... and it's becoming more and more frequent.)
I gave this book 5 stars because:
1) it's remarkably creative
2) it's easy to read
3) FUN and FREEDOM are the backbones of linux, and I think this book will help spread that message.
(It's better then complaining about the book being written for the lowest common denominator, RedHat. I'm a SuSe/Gentoo user BTW.)
Reading this book took me to a place that very clearly reminded me why I prefer linux over M$. FREEDOM to play without rediculous licensing or expensive Hardware.
The book is an easy read (I knocked it out in an evening.) but still worth the 30+ bucks I spent on it. As far as doing the projects?? The picture frame looks like too much fun to passup... I'm searching online for an old laptop tonight... heheh :)
Customer Rating: 3
Summary: ok, not great
Comment: First I was a little disapointed in it's Red Hat slant. I'm more of a Debian fan so I was kindof bummed that all the code was in rpm format. After downloading Alian and converting the rpms to debs I then installed the code and had to go through and fix up a lot of stuff. (because they put things in different places)
The book itself is pretty useless, I was hoping for more of a description of how to get certain things done. Mainly I was hoping for a description of how to create a read only filesystem so you don't have to worry about system checks on startup but the author doesn't cover this at all.
Overall there are some pretty neat ideas but I was disapointed that it all revolves around Red Hat and the author doesn't talk about making them work on other systems. He also doesn't talk about how the scripts work, just how to install them (rpm -i...) I thought the book was a bit simple and should have been called "Red Hat Toys"