So, you’ve staked out your homestead on the Linux frontier, and installed and configured your system. What’s next? Eventually you’ll want to communicate with other systems—Linux and otherwise—and the Pony Express isn’t going to suffice.

Fortunately, Linux supports a number of methods for data communication and networking. This mostly means TCP/IP these days, but other techniques such as serial communications and even communication via radio links are available. In this chapter, we discuss how to configure your system to communicate with the world.

The Linux Network Administrator’s Guide (O’Reilly), also available from the Linux Documentation Project, is a wide-ranging guide to configuring TCP/IP and other networking protocols under Linux. For a detailed account of the information presented here, we refer you to that book.