Ok, so maybe the title is a bit misleading, but here is the deal. The Linux Foundation, you know the guys who safe guard Linux and employ Linus, are going to offer free, as in beer, educational webinars on the topics of Linux starting in March.

This is a great opportunity for you to learn more about Linux from the folks who are developing and changing Linux everyday! You can sign up for the courses at:

http://training.linuxfoundation.org/lp/sign-up-for-the-free-linux-training-webinar-series

Here are some details from the page above:

Starting in March, The Linux Foundation will be offering free Linux Training webinars taught by well-known Linux developers directly building on their own experience.  This is an excellent opportunity to learn directly from key developers and to experience a sample of the type of courses offered through our Linux Training program.

Some of the upcoming courses are:

• “An Introduction to Git,” by kernel maintainer and TAB chair James Bottomley
• “Linux System Troubleshooting and Tuning” by Linux author and community manager Joe Brockmeier
• “Linux Administration 101″ also by Joe Brockmeier
• “How to Work wth the Linux community,” by LWN.net editor and kernel developer Jon Corbet
• “A Linux Filesystem Overview,” by kernel dev Christoph Hellwig
• “Btrfs: An Intro and Update” to the new file system for Linux, by project lead Chris Mason
• “Linux Performance Tuning,” by North America’s first kernel developer Ted Ts’o

I personally am looking forward to these and hopefully many more webinars in the future, and would like to give an advanced thank you to the Linux Foundation for all the great work they are sponsoring every day.

Linux Administration: A Beginners Guide

As Wale Soyinka claims at the beginning, Linux Administration: A Beginner’s Guide, Fifth Edition; is a book for beginners, not for “dummies.” He assumes you know most of the basic terms and concepts needed to run a modest Windows network. This book explains the “why” for many of the facets in running a Linux server, to further complete your knowledge of your system and to understand the options available to you when setting up and tweaking your server to suit your needs.

It covers so many topics that it understandably doesn’t go into a lot of detail on some of them.  But then again, this is not an expert’s guide.  It will, however, help you get pretty familiar with the tools you’ll need and even provides background information about how certain programs evolved.  The content was kept fresh by the author adding gems of humor and making the text read a lot less like a math book than I expected.

There are plenty of command line examples strewn throughout the book, and human-readable explanations of each option you have available to you. Because sometimes, Linux’s man page documentation is too cryptic for those not intimately familiar with an application.  This adds to the book’s value as a reference manual for when you can’t remember everything you read.

This book filled in a lot of the holes in my education concerning Linux and administration in general.  A good investment for anyone looking to start their own solid Linux server, or a reference book for the more seasoned admin. From reading this book, I feel much more confident in my admin-abilities and have solid ground to reach higher levels of Linux administration.  All of which of course, adds to my value as an employee!

It looks like the guys over at Red Hat / Qumranet have released version 78 of KVM over the weekend. The wiki still hasn’t been updated with the change log ( I will post them as soon as I know them ). You can download it from SourceForge