Trying to learn linux

Hey guys, I am starting to dabble now in the Linux environment. I have been a Windows guy for a long time and I am having some trouble making the transition to the command line driven administration. Are there any good resources that you know of that I can use to learn Linux at the terminal level? I do plan on taking a class or two at the local community college but until then this will have to do. Websites, books, etc resources are all welcome. Thanks in advance!

If you are using any of the debian-based distros like *buntu, you can go to

http://ubuntuguide.org/

and read their wiki. It's pretty darned nice and is very easy to read and understand.

While it's mostly designed for Ubuntu, the commands and methods are pretty applicable to all the *buntu distros.

If you want to learn it from the ground up and find out how it works, I'd highly suggest Gentoo. It makes you do everything from a command line to install and it taught me MUCH about how linux works and how to use it. While I don't use Gentoo as my main OS, I still keep a copy to review once in awhile

right now I am running redhat 9 on a physical box and I have Ubuntu and mandriva 2008 spring running on VMs.

thideras said:

If you want to learn it from the ground up and find out how it works, I'd highly suggest Gentoo. It makes you do everything from a command line to install and it taught me MUCH about how linux works and how to use it. While I don't use Gentoo as my main OS, I still keep a copy to review once in awhile

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Depending on your commitment to this, I would agree with this. I did not know too much about Linux when I first installed Gentoo, and it did take me at least a week to get it setup properly, but I had learned so much just from the install, that I could never pick up from Ubuntu/Debian. The information is out there on how to install it, and the Gentoo forums are pretty good, and they have a wiki with the steps to do lots of things (although some are outdated). If you want to dive head first, go with Gentoo.

grimm003 said:

Depending on your commitment to this, I would agree with this. I did not know too much about Linux when I first installed Gentoo, and it did take me at least a week to get it setup properly, but I had learned so much just from the install, that I could never pick up from Ubuntu/Debian. The information is out there on how to install it, and the Gentoo forums are pretty good, and they have a wiki with the steps to do lots of things (although some are outdated). If you want to dive head first, go with Gentoo.

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I forgot to mention that it takes days to get it installed, even on a fast system

I'd suggest NOT installing it on your main pc for downtime reasons if you do want to go the Gentoo route.

thideras said:

I forgot to mention that it takes days to get it installed, even on a fast system

I'd suggest NOT installing it on your main pc for downtime reasons if you do want to go the Gentoo route.

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While I did suffer some minor problems getting a GUI compiled I wouldnt say that it took me anywhere close to days. I would say maybe 10 hours max but that would be more because I compiled [insert program] and walked away from it. Granted I did ask a few questions on here but generally speaking it didnt take me days

A great book that I read last year, and really helped me to get started with UNIX/Linux/*nix was:

Learning the UNIX Operating System

The book is an easy read (a little over 100 pages) and was a great start to my UNIX knowledge. I highly recommend it.

VinnyTAMU said:

A great book that I read last year, and really helped me to get started with UNIX/Linux/*nix was:

Learning the UNIX Operating System

The book is an easy read (a little over 100 pages) and was a great start to my UNIX knowledge. I highly recommend it.

Click to expand...

Thanks!! I'll give it a try. I also ordered Linux in a Nutshell. I heard those books are good as well.

I learned tons from Gentoo, and I continue to learn from Gentoo. My system is so customized and networked it's crazy, and Gentoo lets you do this better than any other distro, because it explains everything, and tries to leave open every possible choice. The most important thing in Gentoo is portage, which is the package management system, but someone came along and wrote another package manager called paludis, and the Gentoo devs went out of their way to incorporate it as an option into Gentoo. This is the Gentoo philosophy... give people as much choice as you possibly can, and expect users to understand things and make intelligent choices.

In Ubuntu you don't really need to use the command line for much. My mother never has (she has Ubuntu installed on her box). She points and clicks. However, there is more power in the command line than in any GUI for some tasks. With Gentoo, you will HAVE to use the command line. The Gentoo devs do not design gui apps to do anything. It's considered a waste of time generally.

Whatever distro you decide, learn the package management system inside out (apt for ubuntu, portage for Gentoo). Avoid rpm-based distros, they are pure pain.

In any case, remember that you have the "man" command to show you what a command does and how it works. eg. "man ls" will tell you about the "ls" command, which is like "dir" in DOS (but much more versatile). There is also apropos, which can be useful for finding the command that does something you need. eg. apropos pdf gives:

~ # apropos pdf
docbook2pdf [jw] (1) - (Jade Wrapper) converts SGML files to other formats
dvipdf (1) - Convert TeX DVI file to PDF using ghostscript and dvips
dvipdfm (1) - Produce PDF files directly from DVI files
dvipdft (1) - create thumbnail images for use with dvipdfm
e2pall (1) - convert all EPS files in a LaTeX document to PDF
ebb (1) - extract a bounding box from JPEG, PNG, and PDF files
epstopdf (1) - convert an EPS file to PDF
fdf2tex (1) - Convert PDF formular data (FDF) into something (Con)TeX(t) can handle
foomatic-ppdfile (1) - Generate a PPD file for a given printer/driver combo
gs (1) - Ghostscript (PostScript and PDF language interpreter and previewer)
gsnd (1) - Run ghostscript (PostScript and PDF engine) without display
htdig-pdfparser (1) - parse a PDF document (wrapper script for htdig)
makempy (1) - Helper script for conversion of (PDF or PostScript) text to Metapost graphics
makempy (1) - convert PDF or PostScript text to MetaPost graphics
mptopdf (1) - convert MetaPost to PDF
pdf2dsc (1) - generate a PostScript page list of a PDF document
pdf2ps (1) - Ghostscript PDF to PostScript translator
pdfeinitex [pdfetex] (1) - PDF output from e-TeX
pdfetex (1) - PDF output from e-TeX
pdfevirtex [pdfetex] (1) - PDF output from e-TeX
pdffonts (1) - Portable Document Format (PDF) font analyzer (version 3.00)
pdfimages (1) - Portable Document Format (PDF) image extractor (version 3.00)
pdfinfo (1) - Portable Document Format (PDF) document information extractor (version 3.00)
pdfinitex [pdftex] (1) - PDF output from TeX
pdflatex [latex] (1) - structured text formatting and typesetting
pdfopt (1) - Ghostscript PDF Optimizer
pdfroff (1) - create PDF documents using groff
pdftex (1) - PDF output from TeX
pdftohtml (1) - program to convert pdf files into html, xml and png images
pdftools (1) - analyze PDF files, change image colors
pdftoppm (1) - Portable Document Format (PDF) to Portable Pixmap (PPM) converter (version 3.00)
pdftops (1) - Portable Document Format (PDF) to PostScript converter (version 3.00)
pdftosrc (1) - extract source file or stream from PDF file
pdftotext (1) - Portable Document Format (PDF) to text converter (version 3.00)
pdfvirtex [pdftex] (1) - PDF output from TeX
ps2ascii (1) - Ghostscript translator from PostScript or PDF to ASCII
ps2pdf (1) - Convert PostScript to PDF using ghostscript
ps2pdf12 [ps2pdf] (1) - Convert PostScript to PDF 1.2 (Acrobat 3-and-later compatible) using ghostscript
ps2pdf13 [ps2pdf] (1) - Convert PostScript to PDF 1.3 (Acrobat 4-and-later compatible) using ghostscript
ps2pdfwr (1) - Convert PostScript to PDF without specifying CompatibilityLevel, using ghostscript
pstopdf (1) - convert EPS to PDF
texexec (1) - ConTeXt and PDF auxiliary program and batch processor
thumbpdf (1) - generate thumbnail images for a PDF file created with pdftex
tiff2pdf (1) - convert a TIFF image to a PDF document
wvPDF (1) - convert msword documents to PDF
xpdf (1) - Portable Document Format (PDF) file viewer for X (version 3.02)
xpdfrc (5) - configuration file for Xpdf tools (version 3.01)

This will help you find the command to do something when you don't even know if the command exists. You can then use man to get more details about a program.

Here is an excellent place to learn from the ground up. Print it out. It's free.

I've been using ubuntu for about a year and learned some things but yeah it always feels like you are swimming in the shallow end. I just installed Gentoo two days ago and have been working on it since then. This is definitly like going on the deep end. Compiling everything from source/configuring your own kernel you definitly learn a lot more about the insides and out of your system.

It did help that I had used ubuntu for about a year, it made editing config files and the like a little more comfortable then if I had no experience. But if you are really serious Gentoo isn't a bad idea but like people said if you don't know anything about GNU/Linux it's kinda like just jumping right into the deep end.

Configuring and building your own kernel is one of those things that sounds really hard and scary, but in fact is actually quite simple to do. Once you do it a few times, you will be able to do it without even looking at the instructions, and in about 5 minutes or less.

Another vote for gentoo

My first distros were Corel Linux (now Xandros) and Mandrake (now Mandriva). This was back around 2001, and both were famous for their ease of use. I felt constantly lost in the environment, and didn't really learn a thing.

Then I installed gentoo, and within a few minutes I began to understand the operating system in a way I never could have with the the others. In that day I discovered more than I had in months with the others.

Today, I still use Gentoo on my primary PC and my servers, but I also use Kubuntu on slower PCs. *buntu approaches the desktop-iness that Mandriva and Corel never could, and it's nice to not have to worry about compiling every program, but just like windows, when something in the GUI doesn't work, then what? Then, I find myself longing for gentoo.

I've actually found that on a really slow PC, Gentoo can be the ideal OS. It's incredibly lean and fast, and you can optimize for size, which is great for low ram systems. However, the trick is to actually keep a full Linux system on a fast PC that has a superset of the instruction set of the slow PC, and build the packages there, and then just unpack the binaries to the slow PC. Gentoo is very fast... it's just the compiling on an old machine that you want to avoid (it's not *that* bad... I build Gentoo from scratch a year or two ago on a P1 233 MMX... but don't try to build openoffice there...)

First off, I recommend a virtual machine for testing systems. VirtualBox is good and free. You don't have to worry about anything and you can test as many systems as you want all at once till you find one you like. Without touching your partition table & file systems.

Ah Gentoo... Go with something else till you get your feet wet. I too used Gentoo but most of the time it's nice to use your computer to do stuff instead of doing stuff to your computer to use it, you know? Anyway there was some good advice not to use your main box for your first Gentoo install... heed it.

Ubuntu is popular, but so are Fedora, openSUSE, Mint, ... a hundred others. I like Ubuntu myself as Debian is a very solid starting point (OpenSSH blunders aside). Just try every distro you think looks good until you find one you really like. Switching from distro to distro is pretty easy at the beginning. Once you know your way around a distro you might find things are different on another, but on the surface they're mostly similar.

I started dual-booting Linux about 6 years ago, made the total switch about 4 years ago. Since then I've also used Mac OS X, the BSDs, OpenGenera (look this one up!), and almost anything else I could get my hands on. Since then Linux distros have improved beyond my imagination, and when I use Windows these days I wonder how people live with such a barebones system (sometimes). I'm not a Windows hater, I have my beef, but a lot of the time it's the right tool for the job. It's not my first choice but it's not my last either.

MRD said:

I've actually found that on a really slow PC, Gentoo can be the ideal OS. It's incredibly lean and fast, and you can optimize for size, which is great for low ram systems.

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If you have a box that old and it can't even run Xfce well ... use fluxbox! Seriously though put OpenBSD on it and use it as a router or something or recycle it out of its misery. You're putting too much effort into it by compling on the slow box or cross-compiling .... unless you're just having fun I guess.

Depends what you want to do with it. P1 class computers work fine for word processing, email, and a number of other tasks. Unfortunately, they now really suck for web browsing due to the extremely high flash content on the web which eats processor power like Germans eat sausages.

I had a non-networked PC in my office that I use for academic work. It's good in some ways because I can't get distracted and check email or browse the web.

Fair enough. I certainly surfed the web and programmed on my Pentiums back in the day. You need the FlashBlock extension for Firefox.. if you use Fx on that beast.

I put Gentoo on a P3, that's as adventurous as I got, heh. Gentoo is one OS where you see monumental gains from upgrades to your processing power. A nice excuse for OCers to get new toys.

Nice thread. I'm getting kinda sold on Gentoo reading this, gonna have to check that out.

I've been using Ubuntu since Edgy Eft, and have enjoyed it. Its simple and lets me just get things done. I find the frustrations with the computer getting in my way much less than I did on Windows.

On the other hand, I find the testimonials to lessons learned from installing and running Gentoo pretty attractive. The comment about swimming in the shallow end with Ubuntu hit home, while I like it and am happy, I don't feel I'm learning much from it.

I remember the first time I installed Gentoo. I had to follow every instruction, and I didn't know what 75% of them even did.

My last new install was for a P3. I did the install before I got the computer ($12 on ebay). I created a file that was about 10gb of 0's and then formatted the file as an ext3 filesystem for my / directory. I made one for boot too. I mounted the files via a loopback as virtual drives and unpacked the tarballs. Then I chrooted and built the entire environment from the ground up optimized for a P3. I did all the compilation on an Athlon XP 3200+. When the P3 got here, I just booted with a livecd, started portmap and nfs, and mounted the images from the other machine over nfs and copied all the files over, preserving perms and hierarchy structure. Everything pretty much just worked.

With Gentoo, the more you get to understand it, the more you will realize just how much you can do to manipulate it to suit your needs. I haven't found this with any other distro.