On October 5, 1991, Linus Torvalds posted this message to the newsgroup comp.os.minix: Do you pine for the nice days of minix-1.1, when men were men and wrote their own device drivers? Are you without a nice project and just dying to cut your teeth on an OS you can try to modify for your needs? Are you finding it frustrating when everything works on minix? No more all-nighters to get a nifty program working? Then this post might be just for you :-)

Linus went on to introduce the first cut of Linux to the world. Unbeknownst to him, he had unleashed what was to become one of the world’s most popular and disruptive operating systems. Seventeen years later, an entire industry has grown up around Linux. And chances are, you’ve probably already used it (or benefitted from it) in one form or another! A part of the title of this book reads “A Beginner’s Guide”; this is mostly apt. But what the title should say is “A Beginner’s to Linux Administration Guide,” because we do make a few assumptions about you, the reader. (And we jolly well couldn’t use that title because it was such a mouthful and not sexy enough.) But seriously, we assume that you are already familiar with Microsoft Windows servers at a “power user” level or better. We assume that you are familiar with the terms (and some concepts) necessary to run a small- to medium-sized Windows network. Any experience with bigger networks or advanced Windows technologies, such as Active Directory, will allow you to get more from the book but is not required.

We make this assumption because we did not want to write a guide for dummies. There are already enough books on the market that tell you what to click without telling you why; this book is not meant to be among those ranks. Furthermore, we did not want to waste time writing about information that we believe is common knowledge for power users of Windows. Other people have already done an excellent job of conveying that information, and there is no reason to repeat that work here.