Part Four: Case Studies

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Chapter 14: Building a Desktop System

Chapter 15: A Corporate Software Development Environment

Chapter 16: Building a Network Firewall

The next part of this book is a set of case studies. These three chapters describe actual real-world systems. As you'll see, though the systems start from the same stock distribution, they turn out quite differently. Once you've read these chapters, you'll be able to build such systems yourself. Even more than that, though, this is the last push of this book—it's the coup de grace, and after reading these chapters, you'll have gone end to end, from basics to application.

The three case studies are of different configurations of systems that I use. These aren't just theoretical examples, they're actual configurations used on a daily basis. The first is a desktop system that is suitable for home use. It includes software such as a good desktop environment, movie players, games, and so on. The second configuration is a corporate workstation used for software development in several languages. This system is part of a large network, and it includes a variety of technically oriented software. The third and final configuration is a firewall that I use on my home network.

Each case study system is built from a stock installation of Red Hat Linux 7.3. The studies take you through the process of installing (and in some cases removing) software packages and configuring the system for a specific goal.

You don't really need to read these chapters in any particular order, so if you're only interested in one or two cases, you can come back and read the others later. However, these chapters do draw extensively on the material covered in Parts One through Three. This means that the case studies focus on telling you what to do and refer to previous chapters to tell you how. In other words, be sure you're familiar with the other parts of this book before you read these chapters.

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