Until now, Computing Reviews sent me books to review by snail mail. This time I received a portable document format (PDF) file, so I had to read the book on my computer screen. Although I have a large screen (24-inch), I found the experience tiring and cumbersome. You cannot browse the book, you cannot read backward quickly, you cannot get a quick look at other parts of the book at random. The only advantages in this case are that I got the book much faster than customary and it doesn’t take up space in my library. Oh yes, there is another advantage: searching for a specific word is very easy; thus, I can easily observe that the words GNU, Debian, and Unix, for example, appear in the book a very small number of times and are neither defined nor explained. This can be considered surprising in a book devoted to an operating system that owes so much to the three mentioned concepts. Still, I think I will buy it as soon as possible, in order to have it in my hands as a real object.

The book consists of 12 chapters, plus three appendixes and additional front material. Its general layout is rather pleasant.

The first chapter, “Meet Linux Mint,” contains the customary self-advertisement about one’s distribution, found in all similar books. Mint is advertised as more popular than Ubuntu, but counting the number of questions asked about these distributions on some news website is certainly not a reliable technique. Also, presenting a distribution with only screen copies of its desktop is disappointing.

Chapter 2, “Creating Boot Media and Installing Linux Mint,” assumes that the reader knows Windows; everything is explained with reference to this system. Planning the partition scheme is often not explained at all in Ubuntu books, as this is considered too complicated for a beginner. However, this book demonstrates that this concept can be explained clearly and simply.

Chapter 3 presents Cinnamon, the desktop environment of Linux Mint, or rather one of the available desktop environments. One of the major goals of the people who developed Linux Mint was to provide an alternative to Unity, the new desktop environment defined for Ubuntu version 10.10, which was much criticized by Ubuntu users. In fact, Cinnamon can be used with Ubuntu in place of Unity.

One of the most useful though almost hidden features of all Linux desktop environments is the possibility of having several workspaces. This allows for several different screens with different applications running on them. Thus, you no longer need to minimize your current application in order to maximize another one. But several desktop environments, including Unity and Cinnamon, underemphasize this capability.

Chapter 4, “An Introduction to the Terminal,” is in fact an introduction to the shell. Explanations about the shell are well presented, but there is a gross error in explaining the find command by using an unquoted joker expression. Anybody testing the command shown will get an error message because the joker expression is expanded before the command is called. In fact, it seems that chapter 4 was shortened too roughly; thus, the script example is useless, and notations like the jokers or the “.” notation are not explained at all. Finding the proper balance between not frightening beginners and providing a useful reference is difficult.

Chapter 5, “Utilizing Storage and Media,” fills a need not frequently covered in other books. It is difficult to understand how to format a flash drive, especially because there is some confusion between using a graphical user interface (GUI) or not. This chapter is not suited for beginners; it should be shortened and moved to an appendix, as demonstrated by the space devoted to the universally unique identifier (UUID) concept.

To comment on all the chapters with the same level of detail would make this review much too long, thus I will simply summarize the rest. Some chapters simply explain how to install some new applications, presenting them with only a screen copy. Others, on the contrary, explain in a detailed way how to manage users and permissions, or how to set a static Internet Protocol (IP) address or share files using the network file system (NFS). Beginners will appreciate the first category of chapters, but they will miss detailed explanations about using the applications. Advanced users will find the explanations in the second category of chapters more interesting, but also rather shallow.

All in all, chapters about administration and advanced usage are more numerous than chapters about applications, and they provide welcome information since it’s rare to find all that in the same book. The weaknesses of Linux Mint are not hidden under the rug.

The appendices deal with using the MATE and KDE editions of Linux Mint, as well as with reinstalling Mint while retaining data. These are also very welcome, although once again the screen copies are not very useful.

All this means that the author managed to build an interesting and useful book about an interesting variant or derivation of Ubuntu. As I said above, I’ll buy a hard copy in order to be able to read it comfortably.

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