“Using and Administering Linux” Book Progress Update

I’ve been working on the 3^rd Edition of my 3 volume “Using and Administering Linux” self study series. Although I had a good plan for this newest edition, I’ve already found things that I’d missed while planning the changes I needed to make from the 2^nd edition.

One of the planned changes in the first 15 chapters is to install Fedora using the Everything ISO image, which allows use of EXT4 filesystems on an LVM base, and much better control of the filesystems to be created, such as /var, /usr, and so on. Installation from the Fedora Xfce ISO, and almost all the other ISO images, no longer allows that as it creates a “one size fits all” BtrFS filesystem with / (root) and /home subvolumes. While this is great for certain use cases such as new users who neither want nor need to know about disk formatting, it doesn’t work for many enterprise use cases that require a more traditional approach. Not to mention that BtrFS is not as reliable as I would like.

I’m currently working on Chapter 16, “Linux Boot and Startup,” which is where most of the unanticipated changes are needed so far. This includes a better sequence of the sections describing BIOS/MBR boot and the UEFI/GPT boot. I’ve simplified some of the explanations, added some additional information about the GPT, and am in the process of rewriting many of the lab projects to better support the revised text.

The chapters will stay the same, as the 2nd Edition, but some chapters about files and filesystems will be moved from Volume 2 into Volume 1 to provide a single location for them. It will also make the sizes of the first 2 volumes more equal.

This is an ambitious project and will take a good amount of time. Fortunately it won’t take nearly as long as the more than a year it took to write the first Edition.