Introduction

Welcome to the Official Red Hat Linux Reference Guide.

The Official Red Hat Linux Reference Guide contains useful information about your Red Hat Linux system. From fundamental concepts, such as the structure of the Red Hat Linux file system, to the finer points of system security and authentication control, we hope you will find this book to be a valuable resource.

This guide is for you if you want to learn a bit more about how your Red Hat Linux system works. Topics that you can explore within this manual include the following:

The file system structure
The boot process
The X Windowing System
Security issues
Network services

Changes To This Manual

This manual has been reorganized for clarity and updated for the latest features of Red Hat Linux 8.0. Some of the changes include:

A New Boot Loaders Chapter: The GRUB chapter has been revised and expanded to include LILO.
An Updated Apache HTTP Server Chapter: There is now a guide for migrating from version 1.3 to version 2.0 of the Apache HTTP Server. Also, the list of server configuration options has been updated. Special thanks to Gary Benson and Joe Orton for his hard work on the Apache HTTP Server migration guide.
Updated LDAP Chapter: The LDAP chapter has been cleaned up and reorganized.
Updated iptables Chapter: The iptables chapter has been clarified and reorganized.
Updated Tripwire Chapter: The Tripwire chapter has been clarified and reorganized (and even has a fancy new illustration ;-).

Before reading this guide, you should be familiar with the contents of the Official Red Hat Linux Installation Guide concerning installation issues, the Official Red Hat Linux Getting Started Guide for basic Linux concepts and the Official Red Hat Linux Customization Guide for general customization instructions. The Official Red Hat Linux Reference Guide contains information about advanced topics that may not affect every user, depending upon how they use their Red Hat Linux system.

HTML and PDF versions of all Official Red Hat Linux manuals are available online at http://www.redhat.com/docs.

Note

Although this manual reflects the most current information possible, you should read the Red Hat Linux Release Notes for information that may not have been available prior to our documentation being finalized. The Release Notes can be found on the Red Hat Linux CD #1 and online at the following URL:

http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/linux