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Simplified install screens, rich desktop interfaces, and GUI administration tools have made Linux an easy operating system to use... unless something goes wrong.
If installation fails, you might find yourself figuring out what kernel options to add at an installation boot prompt. If you check a Linux forum with a server problem, most times your friends will push aside your graphical tools and have you type shell commands and hand-edit configuration file.
With official support options disappearing for Red Hat Linux, and Red Hat's free Fedora Project offered with no long-term official Red Hat support, some people continuing to use free Linux distributions are feeling left out in the cold. If you are devoted to the idea of using free Linux distributions that don't have commercial support options, you have another option-learn to troubleshoot Linux yourself.
Troubleshooting is an often-neglected area of system administration. After books and manuals have gone through the steps to configure and use a feature, usually they've filled up their chapter and are on to the next topic. So what happens if you get to the end of a setup procedure and the feature doesn't work?
Linux Troubleshooting Bible was created to help you troubleshoot failures that you may encounter as you use Linux. For most features covered in Linux Troubleshooting Bible, we take you through some quick, basic steps of setting up that feature. In many cases, running the basic setup will uncover some step you forgot to do. For more details on basic uses of the feature, we point you to books (such as the latest edition of Red Hat Fedora Linux Bible), mailing lists, and websites.
After you have done what should have worked, and found that it didn't work, we tell you how to go a bit deeper. For example, nearly every type of Linux service outputs messages to log files. Daemon processes have verbose or debug modes to spew out reams of messages for tracing down a problem. There are commands that come with many software packages that let you check the status of a feature and see what is broken. The trick is to know where the troubleshooting tools are and how to use them.
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