Large is the universe of all-purpose Linux books that ship with a distribution of the popular open-source Unix clone on CD-ROM. Linux Desktop Starter Kit definitely fits into that group (with four distributions included), but it differentiates itself from the herd via balanced treatment of several popular Linux distributions and a strong chapter on home networking with Linux. Also, productivity applications of the sort that compete with Microsoft Office and other mainstream suites receive careful attention, rather than the afterthought treatment they get in other books, which tend to focus on the operating system at the expense of the things you can do with it.

The home networking chapter deserves a second mention. In it, John Lathrop shows you exactly what you need to do to configure your Microsoft Windows computers for TCP/IP networking, set up a Linux box as a print and file server using Samba, and link everything together. He even provides a recipe for using Linux IP masquerading as a way of sharing an Internet connection among all the computers on the little network you've set up. The recipe is simple and specific to a certain case, but he reprints the whole IP masquerading Howto document as an appendix. In fact, about half this book is Howto documents, including the ones on modems and boot-time parameters. Sure, the Howtos exist on the Internet, but printed copies of them--aside Lathrop's solid tutorials--have extra value. --David Wall, Amazon.com

Topics covered: Installing, configuring and running Linux, explained for the benefit of a reader with no Unix experience and little systems administration knowledge. The focus goes to Red Hat Linux 6.1, but several others (Caldera OpenLinux 2.3, TurboLinux Workstation 3.6 and SuSE Linux 6.1) get substantial attention. Beyond installation, the focus is on office work with StarOffice and (to a lesser extent) Corel WordPerfect Suite. Howto documents on sound, modems, IP masquerading and networking round out this volume.