After you’ve had some experience with Linux, you don’t need someone telling you to click the Help button for help or drag a file to the Trash icon to delete it. What you need is a reference book that shows you powerful commands and options that let you take hold of your Linux system, as well as the processes, users, storage media, network resources, and system services associated with it. SUSE Linux Toolbox provides you with more than 1000 specific command lines to help you become a Linux power user. Whether you are a systems administrator or desktop user, the book will show you commands to create file systems, troubleshoot networks, lock down security, and dig out almost anything you care to know about your Linux system.

This book’s focus for your Linux command-line journey is openSUSE, the communitybased Linux distribution sponsored by Novell, Inc. and SUSE Linux Enterprise. Tapping into the skills needed to run those systems can help you to work with your own Linux systems and to learn what you need as a Linux professional. Novell, Inc., which develops SUSE Linux systems, shook the free and open source software world in 2006 when it entered into a cooperative agreement with Microsoft. That agreement promised to protect each of the two companies’ customers from patentrelated lawsuits that could arise from the other company’s patent portfolios, while threatening to set a precedent for a Microsoft tax on thousands of other installed Linux systems in existence today.

The agreement also brought with it the probability that thousands of SUSE installations would make their way into locations that were once exclusively Microsoft shops. Linux systems that were once touted as evil, broken, incompatible, “just a toy,” or stolen from honest commercial software developers is, in one wave of the hand, just fine for the Microsoft faithful to use . . . as long as they choose Novell’s SUSE Linux systems.