About this Book

20220812

This book has been a work in progress since 1995, just as GNU/Linux continues to develop and expand into our devices. Every begins with a date that indicates the currency of that section—when it was last reviewed and/or updated. Readers are invited to send corrections, comments, suggestions, and updates to me at . Your feedback is most welcome and will be acknowledged.

Since beginning the survival guide books in 1995 they have grown in all kinds of directions. My original aim was to capture useful notes for the varied and many common tasks we find ourselves doing, utilising the tools and packages of GNU/Linux. I structured the book as one page nuggets of information. That is, each section within a chapter targeted a single printed page, and focused on a single task. This was the origin of my OnePageR Desktop Survival Guides. It seems to have worked well over the years, from my personal use and your feedback. This material has also lead to the publication of two books.

A pdf version of this book is available for a small financial donation which goes towards supporting the development and availability of the book. Please visit Togaware for the details. The html version contains the same material and remains freely available from Togaware

Production

This book is produced using bookdown, editting the text documents using emacs. Many will be using RStudio to edit their bookdown documents, which is a generally more friendly environment and is the environment of choice for bookdown support. I’ve used emacs since 1985 and as a fully extensible “kitchen-sink” type of editor, it has served me well for over 35 years, despite numerous flirtations with “better” editors over my career.

Bookdown is an rmarkdown based platform for intermixing text with executable code (like Python, R and Shell code blocks). Rmarkdown itself utilises the simple markdown syntax to markup the sections of a document. After running knitr over the rmarkdown material a markdown document is produced.

Pandoc is then utilised to produce html which is published on the Web. For the pdf output pandoc utilises LaTeX, converting the markdown into LaTeX markup, with xetex used to then convert that to pdf.

All these tools are open source software and available on multiple platforms.

Many books are written using bookdown. Examples include Data Science at the Command Line (github); Efficient R Programming (github).

Screen Shots

Throughout the book screen shots are presented using a variety of GNOME and KDE themes. As the book evolves the screen shots are generally from the GNOME desktop and some current theme that I might be using at that time. The theme specifies what things look like inside the windows that an application displays, as well as what the window frame looks like—that is, the area immediately surrounding the application’s window. There is an large collection of themes available to suit different preferences. Refer to the discussion of themes in Chapter 85 for details.


Your donation will support ongoing availability and give you access to the PDF version of this book. Desktop Survival Guides include Data Science, GNU/Linux, and MLHub. Books available on Amazon include Data Mining with Rattle and Essentials of Data Science. Popular open source software includes rattle, wajig, and mlhub. Hosted by Togaware, a pioneer of free and open source software since 1984. Copyright © 1995-2022 Graham.Williams@togaware.com Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0