Book review: 'Ubuntu: Up and Running,' by Robin Nixon (O'Reilly)

I actually paid for this book. Even though I'm fairly adept in the GNOME desktop, what intrigued me about "Ubuntu: Up and Running," by Robin Nixon (O'Reilly, April 2010) was that it was the first "how-to" book on running Linux to come out on the O'Reilly imprint in a very long time.

(I'm not counting Rickford Grant's excellent "Ubuntu for Non-Geeks" from No Starch Press, one of my very favorite publishers, one that happens to be connected somehow to O'Reilly. The O'Reilly imprint still means something, and a lack of Linux-user guides is something that has puzzled me to a great extent.)

Why? What's so terrible about Linux-distro how-to books that O'Reilly hadn't done one since ... wait for it ... "Fedora Linux," by Chris Tyler (October 2006). Five years ago. That's eons and eons in "Linux time." Before that, "Suse Linux," by Chris Brown came out in July 2006, and the fifth (and seemingly final) edition of "Running Linux," By Matthias Kalle Dalheimer and Matt Welsh was released by O'Reilly in December 2005.

It turns out there were plenty of Linux releases from O'Reilly in 2005 and 2004 — look here for yourself to see everything O'Reilly classifies under "Linux" from 1986-present (which includes a lot of Unix, as Linux itself didn't begin until the 1990s.

What happened between 2005/6 and 2010? That was a good four years (again, eons — EONS!!) ago.

I can't begin to answer the question. Linux didn't get "too easy" during that time. The OSes built around the kernel certainly got many millions' more users during that time. A passel of good books from probably the best tech publisher out there would have been welcomed.

Now there's "Ubuntu: Up and Running." Thankfully it's an excellent book. Better than many I've seen. It's almost easy enough for beginners yet worthy of a seasoned user's attention. Even though I've been using Linux since 2007, I learned quite a few tips from Nixon's well-done volume.

Looking at O'Reilly's list of upcoming titles, it looks like there are no Linux how-to books from any of O'Reilly's affiliated imprints, or from O'Reilly itself, through May 2011.

I had hope — and still hope — to see a new version of "Ubuntu: Up and Running," that takes into account all the changes in the upcoming 11.04 and 11.10 releases of Ubuntu, which will be moving away from the GNOME desktop to Unity. Ubuntu moves very fast, and there are likely hundreds of additional changes since Nixon's book, which was targeted at 10.04 but was seemingly written in the 9.10 era.

I suppose that Nixon had some reason to think that Ubuntu 10.04, as a long-term-support release, wouldn't be the radical departure from Ubuntu 9.10 that it turned out to be. Things like a whole new design, the "social from the start" concept, Ubuntu One, the mysteriously moving menu buttons and more things I'm already forgetting, made the 10.04 LTS more of a development release than a stable one, albeit a development release set to receive 3 years' of security patches on the desktop (and 5 years on the server, which luckily isn't affected by just about any of the distro's UI changes).