Chasing the ball

C

Canadian in Berlin

Gawd
Joined
Sep 8, 2007
Messages
697
So somewhere in my evolution as a computer geek I missed the *nix ball. At home I never ahd the time, at school I was interested in other topics, and now I'm living in Europe and everywhere I only see demand for Unix/linux specialists. I'm currently plugging away in Incident Management(it pays the bills) and hoping that if I can pick up some *nix skills I can make the jump to the stuff that actually interests me.

So this brings me here with some questions, that can point me in the right direction for more questions. Eventually leading somewhere down the road to some knowledge (and more questions).

In my current situation, its not possible for me to take a course or get schooling (what I#ve already learned is cisco networking, WinServer 2003/ISA Server and Novell Netware. I'm also not necessarily (at this moment, anyway) chasing after a certification. I'm wanting to run *nix of some sort at home, and possibly with good tutorial websites, some tips, and maybe some good books dick around enough to get a decent understanding of how it works. At some point I might like to run a server on a *nix box.

So the questions:
1. Which distro? Ubuntu is happy fuzzy fun (I helped my mom get that one working over the phone along with the help of some people on the Ubuntu Forums... yay driver/hardware/etc problems :p). But its not a formal in business OS, but would it be a good starting port, or would something else be better?
2. Depending upon the reccomended DIstro... tutorial websites, info websites, noob-friendly forums and maybe even some books that would help me start at the "useful basics", administration of MY machine and work my way up to run a relatively simple server on it? Once I'm that far I should be able to stumble my way further forward I believe.
3. Would running this setup in WMware suffice (for now)? Or would I be best off using dedicated hardware here?
4. Does this sound like a decent starting point at all? I mean, the best way to learn is usually to dive on in, but bring a lifejacket with you.


I'm sure I forgot a few points, because I've been pondering this a few days and am writing this from work. :)
 
first of all, welcome to the wonderful world of unix :D I don't run windows on a single computer that I own. Anyway, lets tackle these questions in order:

1. If you really want to learn how linux works on the inside, then there is nothing better than my personal favorite distro, Gentoo. It can be very intimidating for someone with little unix experience, but they have an incredible community (great forums!) and a vast amount of how-to's and tutorials on gentoo-wiki.com. Plus you basically build your own personal linux setup from scratch, so you learn a lot along the way. If that's a little too hardcore for you, then I'd recommend Debian or Slackware, they're a bit easier but still *real* distros and not happy-fuzzy-flower-time distros.

FreeBSD is another great choice if you want to learn unix, FreeBSD 7.0 was just released recently and it's got a lot of cool new features. It feels much like gentoo does, but with an easier install. Any of the other BSDs would work fine too, but FreeBSD is generally the best out of them all.


2. Given that my two main recommendations are Gentoo and FreeBSD (for linux and unix, respectively), their own communities are the best places to learn and get support. Gentoo's forums and tutorial pages and amazing, and the FreeBSD handbook covers pretty much every typical system task you'll ever need to do.

3. Yes you could run in VMware if you wanted, but if that's the case you'd want to pick a distro other than gentoo, since compiles would be painfully long. I'd recommend using an old computer that you may have lying around, if possible, just because you'll need to learn how to configure hardware on linux eventually. Plus it'll be a bunch faster.

4. yes it sounds like a good starting place to me. You may feel like a noob, but just remember that no one popped out of the womb knowing this stuff. You'll catch on just like everyone else does, you just have to keep an open mind and, above everything else, remember that linux is not windows, so do not expect it to be!

Hope this helps :)
 
Yeah, that does. :)

I'm aware of the differences between Linux and Windows, which is why I mostly use Windows (gaming), but knowledge of Linux would be very helpful in my career path, not to mention a fun learning experience. (after all the frustration and smashing your head against a wall, its nice to know that you just chowned the problem and learned something on the way.)
 
by the way, after a quick round of google I found a ton of results for triple booting with Ubuntu, Vista and XP... shouldn't be much different if its Gentoo/FreeBSD and the others right? I can't fully scrap XP yet because I haven't had the time to trouble shoot my problems with 3DS Max in Vista (or in 64-bit, not sure yet).
 
Canadian in Berlin said:
by the way, after a quick round of google I found a ton of results for triple booting with Ubuntu, Vista and XP... shouldn't be much different if its Gentoo/FreeBSD and the others right? I can't fully scrap XP yet because I haven't had the time to trouble shoot my problems with 3DS Max in Vista (or in 64-bit, not sure yet).
Click to expand...

Ubuntu will autopartition your disks for you during the install process. I can't speak on behalf of FreeBSD, but you'll have to manually partition with Gentoo, and write your own GRUB menu. Generally, anything Ubuntu does automatically and transparently must be done manually in Gentoo, and while that means there are more opportunities for you to do something wrong, the Gentoo Handbook really does a good job at holding your hand through the process. The Wiki and Forum are also good resources - just search through them.

EDIT: By the way - Gentoo, while it's my weapon of choice, isn't really the "industry" distro. For that, I'd recommend CentOS, which is Red Hat-based, and will give you more experience with administration of a typical industry-like setup. It's pretty much the "community" release of RHEL.
 
Ok. thanks for the tips. Nothing says I can't start with Gentoo, and rotate through the various systems for practice... or buy more HDs.... :D

I also asked one of the admins I know at work what we use there so I can try and cheat the system and transfer internally. :)
 
For what it's worth, the company I work for has XP for the sales people and Ubuntu (various flavours) for us techies. I happen to disagree with most of the people on this forum, who seem to think that if you want to learn Linux you have to do it the absolute hardest way possible (not slating anyone in this thread, btw). Personally, I've always tried bits and pieces with Red Hat/OpenSuse, but my distro of choice is that of my company - Ubuntu.

Why? Because it lets me get on with my job in the least obstructive way possible. If you want to fiddle with the guts of it, you're quite welcome to - there's nothing in Ubuntu which says you can't do stuff with it, and then when you haven't got time to dick around you can just get on with it using the fairly polished desktop tools provided. This also works well for the beginner - you can start off just using the desktop tools, and then (with a bit of discipline) descend into the murky depths of as much arcane command-line syntax as you can safely handle.

I suppose my company's odd in that we use Ubuntu wherever there's a Linux desktop, and all of our servers are Debian/Ubuntu based - when you've got that much in-house knowledge of the OS on the desktop, it doesn't make much sense to go pay through the nose for an expensive distro on your hosted servers.
 
The first thing you'd want to do is to check out any local *nix groups in the area so you can get a feel for what companies are running. Then you can go and base your decision on that. Just to be safe I would suggest a derivitave of Red Hat (Centos/Fedora/etc.) and FreeBSD and netBSD. The most useful thing to learn within *nix though is shell scripting. Anyone can pretty much point and click in a safe gui, but most of your *nix interaction will be with the cli.
 
Keiichi said:
The most useful thing to learn within *nix though is shell scripting. Anyone can pretty much point and click in a safe gui, but most of your *nix interaction will be with the cli.
Click to expand...

This is exactly the heart of the issue. I didn't mean to sound so condescending to "easy" distros like ubuntu; they work great and are a wonderful thing for casual users and beginners to dive into unix with. But, at the end of the day, you're not going to get a job for knowing how to point-and-click in ubuntu. You're going to get a job as a unix tech for pretty much one reason: shell scripting.

To the OP: just try out a bunch of distros and see which one you like the best. We can all banter back and forth about our personal preference forever, but at the end of the day its just preference. It's all the same set of programs and toolkits running on the same kernel. And it's all free; your only limitation is how many discs you're willing to burn for new installs :p
 
The quickest and easiest way to dive in and try out a number of distributions is Live CDs. There's dozens of live cd distros out there based on Redhat/Fedora, SuSE, BSD, etc. Nothing to install, no VM's to set up, just boot the CD and plug away. Different distros have their own strengths/weaknesses and as Eva_Unit_0 said, you're only out a little time and blank CDR's. And in the meantime, your hard drive remains untouched.

Check out distrowatch, it tracks many of the more common and popular linux and bsd distros.
 
My recommendation seeing as you need to do alot of learning (vs experimenting) is to stay focused on the two distros that are most popular in the business world; Suse and Redhat.

If you want to get really proficient you will just need to practice, practice, practice and then start looking for ways to get the professional experience. Field work is where the true learning happens.
 
Yeah, I found out that we use Debian Linux at work, so I'll probably start with Ubuntu on the wife's computer (she's getting sick of windows, and it'll work better for her needs, I can use VMware to run Office 2007 (works better for the lab writeups and stuff she does) and Lightroom) in Linux.

Once I#ve fooled around there for a while, I've got a Gentoo DVD waiting to be burned to play with that, and then I'll play with Debian, I'm not planning to try for a job with this stuff for quite some time, but I want to get started. its a 4-day weekend coming up, good a time as any to get started. :)

Thanks for all of the advice, would you reccomend any books? Or just forums, learning and experimenting (aka, trying to do various things: router, firewall, web server, ftp server, proxy server, etc?).
 
If you're just starting out, the linux documentation project is a good place to start reading. You can download all the docs in html or pdf and look them over at your convenience. The advanced bash scripting guide is a good start for all things shell related. Also remember that man pages are your friend.

Theres a lot of good forums and sources for how-to's all over the net, I'm sure a few will chime in and suggest a few. Google has always been a good friend to me for whatever I'm trying to figure out.

If you prefer hard copy books, you cant go wrong with O'Reilly. Gotta love anyone who can write over 400 pages on just awk and sed.

 
Eva_Unit_0 said:
This is exactly the heart of the issue. I didn't mean to sound so condescending to "easy" distros like ubuntu; they work great and are a wonderful thing for casual users and beginners to dive into unix with. But, at the end of the day, you're not going to get a job for knowing how to point-and-click in ubuntu. You're going to get a job as a unix tech for pretty much one reason: shell scripting.
Click to expand...

You know, I really don't get it - what, exactly, is it in Ubuntu which stops you doing this? I'm neither a casual user nor a beginner - quite the opposite, in fact - yet I find that Ubuntu (and the other Debian-based distros) suit my needs very well, both on the server and the desktop. It's fast, relatively light, has a great package manager, has regular refreshes with LTS versions to placate the more conservative managers, and is very well supported in the community (certainly more so than, say, Fedora).

I'm really not trying to turn this into a "my distro's better than yours" thread, but comments like that do nothing except spread misinformation. On the other hand, your assertion that the OP should try as many as possible is bang-on; just don't discount a distro because of rumours.
 
Well, with Ubuntu being debian based (which is what we're using here at work), it might be the PERFECT starting point for me, at some point switching to Debian. Ideally I'll play around for 6-8 months then try and get an internal transfer if I can. If that doesn#t work, then I'll just play around anyway, knowing Unix/Linux is always a plus in the modern world, lots of companies like having it around for their servers, or even just 1. I often see job adds wanting windows and/or cisco knowledge... but knowing some unix is a big perk. So... :)


Again, my favourite thing that I discovered with Linux/Unix, was the fabulous community support behind it. When we were getting it installed on my mom's computer, we had trouble with the wireless card, and 3 people several hours per day(over several days) posting back and forth on the ubuntu forums, with me on the phone to help walk my mom through it. Its finally working and she loves it.
 
You might also give Arch a try. Similar to gentoo but not quite. I prefer it.
 
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