Multitool Linux: A Book Review

Title:
Multitool
LinuxAuthors: Michael
Schwarz, Jeremy Anderson, Peter Curtis and Steven
MurphyPublisher:
Addison-WesleyISBN:
0-201-73420-6Multitool Linux aims to present
"practical uses for open-source software". The book can be divided
into five parts. The first part (chapter 1) explains what Linux and
free/open-source software are, in general terms. All of the other
chapters present one or more tools that solve everyday problems
using open-source software.The second part of the book deals with system administration
issues. Chapters 2-9 and 11-14 explain why and how to set up NAT,
IP masquerading, Samba, Intrusion detection tools, WebMail, Apache
and department-level web sites. There are also three chapters
covering, in great detail, remote computing via VNC, SSH and e-mail
consoles. The last topic discusses issuing commands to a remote
system via e-mail and receiving the output in the same way, a
useful option if one wants to run something on a home PC from
behind the office firewall.Part three (Chapter 15) is titled "Tools You Should Know",
and it is a 15-page overview of basic UNIX tools, such as grep,
find, vi, Perl and many more.The fourth part of the book, corresponding to chapters 10 and
16 to 24, covers user-space programs. Specifically, chapter 10
explains why it is important to digitally sign and encrypt all
e-mail with GPG and shows you how to do it.Other common problems the book addresses, each with its own
chapter, include having your PC and Palm-like devices talk to each
other, running Windows programs via wine and copying any possible
kind of data onto CDs.The other chapters of this part discuss graphics and
multimedia. Music management is extensively covered; scripts and
tips are offered to save vinyl albums to CD, generate MP3 play
lists, convert a spare PC in a juke-box and much more, from MIDI
software to sound effects generation from both GUIs and the command
line. Differences between the several audio encoding techniques are
introduced as well.A whole chapter is devoted to speech synthesis and how to
have you computer tell you when new mail arrives or when any other
task is performed.Chapters 22 through 24 cover image processing and video
production. Chapter 22 is a good overview of the most popular
graphics formats, explaining when to choose one or another and why,
depending on the final use of the image.An introduction to the world of 3-D graphics is the focus of
Chapter 23. It shows the difference between ray tracers and
modelers, and it goes step by step through the creation of a
tridimensional logo with textures and other goodies, using
PovRay.Chapter 24 is a good starting point for Linux-based
filmmakers. It also touches on simpler concerns, such as how to
play back video files. Above all, this chapter lists all the issues
to take into account when setting up your own Linux-based home
studio. The chapter begins with an overview of what hardware
components are needed, how to hook them together and the status of
Linux support for video production. Next comes a discussion of the
basic components of a good movie (from storyboard to soundtrack)
and how to edit and merge them all together with Linux-based
software. After the already mentioned video playback section, video
CD burning is covered.The book ends with an interesting afterword by coauthor
Michael Schwartz on the future of the software industry, along with
short biographies of all the authors.Overall, Multitool Linux contains many
useful tips and tricks. All of the chapters are up to date and
written with a lot competence and enthusiasm; there is a lot to
learn from this book. In spite of this, the separate parts are not
knit together well, and it is not clear what the main audience of
the book should be.What I called the second part is targeted at system
administrators with some previous IT experience, but the fourth
part is devoted to multimedia desktop processing--although both
fields are equally interesting, they don't really overlap. The book
also would have benefitted from more content editing. For example,
the content in Chapter 15 should have appeared in the book much
sooner. In addition, some material (SSH, kernel compiling, etc.) is
repeated in several different places.

email: m.fioretti@inwind.it