Learning Linux

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KarsusTG

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Anyone know a good online site to learn linux? I can do alot of the basic stuff. I have an ubuntu build I through on a virtual machine that I am trying to learn on and I am familiar with alot of the basic command for simple things like moving, copying, changing permissions, etc.

I am trying to force myself to do everything that I can get away with from the command line interface as this seems to be the best way to really learn linux. That being said, there is alot of things that just seem to go unsaid. What does that . do. Alot of install packages have you do a line like ./tools/yada/install. WTF is that dot for? I dont really have an understanding of how the make command works. I could go on and on, but you guys have probably read this type of post a thousand times. Anyone know a good legitimate site?
 
Just shortly: That dot means "the current directory". It's like how .. means "the parent directory".

Make is ... not entirely trivial to explain. You can read the man page (man make), the wikipedia article is a more general explanation of what it does and how it works, and there is more info around on the 'net.

More generally, uhm ... I sort of slowly absorbed it from using FreeBSD and Linux for a (fairly long) while, reading man pages and searching around on the internet when I needed to. There are probably good and useful books, but I haven't really looked at them.
 
That makes sense with that dot. Dos assumes everything is in relation to the folder you currently in unless you specify otherwise and I was always under the impression linux would be that way too. That was wrong and so was just typing out the paths.. easy day.

I am going to do some more playing around with the make command and a few others. I dont really ever give up so I will get there eventually. Just curious, as I have only ever used Ubuntu. How is freeBSD?
 
The best way I find to learn is just to immerse yourself in it. Whether it be a VirtualBox, or a full out installation. Just use the OS. Whenever you run into something that you're not sure how to do, just Google it. There's tons of documentation out there, and huge communities. A Google search will result in helpful information 95% of the time.
 
Make is kind of a niche tool, unless you're compiling things routinely. :)
(Well, you can also write makefiles for anything else that transforms a bunch of files with command line tools - still quite niche.)

I've gotten very used to FreeBSD, so I've got it on several computers. As for using it, it's honestly not that different - you get the same programs (especially the GUI ones), so it comes down to a different system+package layout, some different tools, a different set of man pages, and somewhat different hardware and filesystem support.

FreeBSD has a "base system" that isn't handled by the package system at all - you can remove every single package and you'd be left with a working system (They do releases from the stable branch, currently 8.2 . There's also a development branch, 9, and you can grab a copy of the current state of that and compile+install it if you prefer; it's oddly easy.)
The package system is different - you get a large directory tree with a makefile and some other descriptive text files; if you go to e.g. /usr/ports/www/firefox and type "make install", it'll download, compile, and install all dependencies + firefox. There are binary packages if you prefer, and some decent tools for managing things. It's better if you want to tune settings, more sensibly organized than most alternatives, but on the other hand apt is better at handling upgrades, or if you just want something installed and working right now.
Some tools are different - "make" gives you BSD make, though you can install GNU make (the usual one on linux), and it'll be "gmake". Top is different, though comparable. There are different monitoring utils installed (gstat and systat are addictive). The disk system is different and has different tools - and they've mostly migrated to ZFS instead of their old software raid system.
There's "jails" : You can start a sort of walled-off part of the system, which is chrooted to somewhere (it thinks a directory of your choice is its root directory) and can get its own IP address. Convenient for testing things, or for separating out security risks.
You select what services start in a different way: The scripts to manage start/stop are in /etc/rc.d for base system tools, and /usr/local/etc/rc.d/ for anything you've installed. To turn things on/off or configure them, edit /etc/rc.conf : As a typical example you'd enable apache22 by adding apache22_enable="YES", and disable it by removing that line again (or changing it to "NO").

So, err ...in short, it's more manual work, but easier to get an overview of. I think.
edit: Oh oops, that ended up as much more text than I though.

Oh, and wheat Jesse B said: Just use it, and whenever you run into an issue try solving it. You'll eventually get the hang of it. :)
 
If you're really hard core about it..

http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/


Personally, I think Gentoo is a very good distro for learning, plus, you get a very customized system of your own. Arch is also a good distro for learning and doesn't require all the compiling that Gentoo does.
 
i've read so many "i want to learn linux" threads and they all have the same thing in common: you will never stick with it until you find a purpose. meaning, you have to use it for day-to-day tasks or have some specific function you want to perform on it. So many times i've seen people say "i've installed linux.... now what???"

i bring this up only to make the point that unless you give yourself a purpose for using it, you'll never bother.

that said, as i was learning how to do certain things, i never used any single site. i would search for everything and use whatever site gave me the best results. if you run into a problem with something, most of the time someone else has already asked the same question.
 
berky said:
i've read so many "i want to learn linux" threads and they all have the same thing in common: you will never stick with it until you find a purpose. meaning, you have to use it for day-to-day tasks or have some specific function you want to perform on it. So many times i've seen people say "i've installed linux.... now what???"

i bring this up only to make the point that unless you give yourself a purpose for using it, you'll never bother.

that said, as i was learning how to do certain things, i never used any single site. i would search for everything and use whatever site gave me the best results. if you run into a problem with something, most of the time someone else has already asked the same question.
Click to expand...

I have found this to be true of alot of things too. I plan on learning it myself and when I get nice and comfy enough with it, I want to have it as my media server and HTPC when I put that together.

I also plan on if I am happy with it, replacing windows on my personal servers at work that I use for VM's and file server with a linux build.

Lastly, I have a few laptops at work that I use for various functions. Usually troubleshooting off site. I had one I put ubuntu on and was using that but there were some things that I just have to be able to do fairly often that I just didn't know how to do and didn't have the time to figure it out at the time.
 
like others posted...you have to find purpose to find problems which lead to knowledge.


Setup VirtualBox

Create a gentoo system

make it a desktop with a full GUI enviroment


then make another gentoo system

make it into a full LAMP server..hell add some SQL


then try out other distros....its all the best to learn it
 
I would say the above, but with Arch. Gentoo is too steep to start with IMO. Arch is the good medium between Ubuntu/Mint and Gentoo
 
illuminate said:
I would say the above, but with Arch. Gentoo is too steep to start with IMO. Arch is the good medium between Ubuntu/Mint and Gentoo
Click to expand...

I agree. Unless you're working on a server or have a very specific purpose in mind, Gentoo is a lot of unnecessary work, in my opinion. Arch is a lot quicker to install, and still gives you loads of customization.
 
For desktop usage, just use it as you normally would and research when you run into problems. Since you've not mentioned making a career out of it, Ubuntu should work just fine in that regard.

You can always hit up a site like linuxquestions.org or this place if you have further questions.

If you're looking to understand it to make a career out of supporting servers, look to CentOS as it looks like Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which is the predominant "enterprise" Linux.
 
when i attempted this journey 8+ yrs ago.... i quit =P. there's just not enough time in the day to figure everything out.

i'm v. old sk00l. if i could learn computers by starting with assembly... i would ;P

so when it came to *nix i started w/a 'humble' base debian distro. got it up&running, recompile all drivers into kernel and played around w/modular driver loading, etc. then i attempted to do many things:
1. play music, CDs, mp3's.... via CLI, it sorta worked... sorta didn't. could never get the open source audio drivers to play nice. hit a wall and then gave up.
2. attempted to apt-get x-win of some sorta, englightenment, gnome or kde. nothing worked. couldn't even get 1024x768 or 800x600 on any x-win manager. hell i don't think i could even figure out how to change higher-resolution console! lolz.
 
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