To this point in the book, we have focused on procedures and tips for getting your Fedora or other Red Hat Linux distribution installed and ready to deploy-sort of the "ounce of prevention" approach to troubleshooting. For the rest of the book, the focus is on learning the skills to troubleshoot running Linux systems.
You will be able to get up to speed much faster if you bring some Linux skills to the table. The first section of this chapter quickly goes over some skills you need to troubleshoot Linux (the shell, ways of gaining root access, and so on), but if you are fairly new to Linux you should refer to some basic Linux text for more help in learning the general skills you need.
Red Hat Linux Bible: Fedora and Enterprise Edition should help provide the foundation of knowledge you need to move on to some of the more advanced troubleshooting techniques described in this book.
While you might want to jump right to a chapter on a particular feature you want to troubleshoot, there are some tools that are useful across a variety of Linux features. For example, tools such as modprobe, lsmod, and modinfo are useful for working with modules when your hardware needs to be manually configured. Tools such as ssh and screen can help you connect to computers on the network, regardless of the particular feature you are troubleshooting on the remote machine. Those and other helpful Linux troubleshooting tools are described in this chapter.