I must say that I was truly disappointed by this book, and by debian for that matter. I have benefited greatly from some of O'Reilly's other computer books however, Mr. McCarty's book is far too general in its coverage of Linux (but not as comprehensive as Running Linux, a far better book), the specifics of the debian distribution, whether they be the file structure, which is different to other distros in many specifics, the unique debian package management facilities, and debian specific configuration issues, are covered in only the most cursory fashion.
I purchased the book as part of the VALinux/SGI/O'Reilly boxed set in hope of having to avoid printing out reams of debian man pages, I was truly upset when I had to log back in to Red Hat, mount my debian partition and print out scores of pages of debian documentation in a vain attempt to diagnose the problems I was having getting apt-get to work and find out what the obscure 'no MMap' et al error messages meant. Unfortunately I can report no succes here, both the book and debian's documentation let me down. This is a real shame, because debian's package management system is touted as one of its greatest advantages over other distributions and should compenstate for the fact that the current official distribution 'slink' is in Linux terms hopelessly out of date.
The age of slink is another issue, the version of Xfree86 that is included doesn't seem to support my video card, nor a great many other cards currently on the market, I had hoped to do an upgrade to a more current version but apt-get failed me. Why not ship with the newer version instead of the half-updated version include? And why not include some of the non-free utilities like Netscape and Acroread for which there exist no suitable 'free' replacements, on a separate cdrom if need be?
I won't talk about the other problems I had with debian, but I've gone back to using Red Hat, or SuSE, Mandrake, Slackware, etc., after my lost long Forth of July weekend in debian's dungeon.
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