Preface Welcome to SUSE Linux: A Complete Guide to Novell's Community Distribution. I have tried to make this an intensely accessible book: its lab-based structure focuses on real, practical activities. Each lab is largely self-contained; there is no underlying plot or thematic development requiring you to start at page 1. No prior knowledge of Linux is needed, but I do assume some level of computer literacy. My ideal reader, I suppose, is the enthusiastic pilgrim journeying from the Land of Windows, or from a commercial version of Unix, or from some other flavor of Linux, or from Mac OS X (though the fierce brand loyalty of Mac users makes such pilgrimages unusual). I have tried to strike a balance between using the desktop and using the command line. If a job can be done both using YaST (SUSE's configuration tool) and at the command line, I have in many cases covered both methods. If you need a primer on using Linux at the command line, start with Lab 3.10, "Use Command-Line Tools." Brown's law states that things always take longer than you expect. It didn't state that yesterday, because I only just made it up. But it does today. Brown's law is recursive. That is, it still applies even after you've applied it. A more complete statement might be, "Things always take longer than you would expect even after allowing for the fact that they will take longer than you expect." (I have always wanted to have a law named after me. Trouble is, all the really good laws have been claimed already by eminent physicists such as Newton, Einstein, and, of course, Murphy. But I think that Brown's law is every bit as fundamental as gravity and relativity.) By all of which I am trying to get around to the confession that I started writing this book around February 2005. At the time, SUSE Linux 9.3 was the latest version. About halfway through writing, SUSE Linux 10.0 came out. And as I wrap up the final round of revisions and we put the book into production, SUSE 10.1 is with us. Fortunately, each release of SUSE Linux represents an evolution, rather than a revo- lution, of what has gone before. Much of what I discuss in this book is relevant to all versions of SUSE Linux. (Actually, much of it is relevant to other Linux distribu- tions, too.) I trust that you won't be too much dismayed by any cosmetic differences between the screenshots in the book and the ones you'll see in whatever distribution ix