Can someone suggest a good, modern, easy to understand book that would hold your hand and take you step-by-step through the process described in the above article? First installing it on a bootable jump drive and then on your computer?
Covering where to get the open-source code, how to set up security, best browsers, office tools, video tools, and so on? Really interested in trying this.
Thanks
While I have not been looking (so I'm not the most up-to-date) at general Linux books, I think that something like that would be very difficult to write. There are several reasons for this
- Linux is constantly changing. While people complain about how many updates Windows has, Operating systems built around the Linux kernel tend to have just as many, if not more. Thus, any book that was published would almost certainly be out of date before it hit the shelves..
- "Best" of any software category is very subjective. However, there are many choices, with many feature sets. This allows you to experiment and choose those which work best for you--in your situation.
- There are many distributions ("distros" in Linux jargon) that you can get from multiple sources. Each distro fills a specific desire or need that the developer thought needed to be filled. This allows Linux OSes to fit into an environment based on the needs of the environment, and not have to be shoehorned in like a one-size-fits-all OS like Windows.
With the above in mind, I will say that if you are truly interested, you need to start researching and determining your needs/wants regarding the OS on your computer. The first place I would start is "a href="http://distrowatch.com/">DistroWatch which follows the more popular and common distros out there, with links to the website for each distro and some reviews. Each distro's website will have a download link and install instructions.
Keep looking even beyond DistroWatch--Search engines are your friend in this case. You will get more hits than you know what to do with.
There are two major divisions in the Linux world that are based on how software is handled. RPM-based distros tend to follow and are modelled after Red Hat. Debian-based distros are based after--wait for it--Debian. There are minor filesystem difference between to the two types, but the kernel will be the same.
I've heard good things about Elementary OS, PCLinuxOS, Kirin, and Mint as good introductory distros for Windows users. I have not, personally, tried any of them out. I run Fedora, which is Red Hat's community distro. You can get the details on each of the previous distros on DistroWatch.