Need to know Linux for work

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rsnellma

Gawd
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Jul 17, 2002
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If I need to know Linux for work, meaning they will pay for the training what route should I take. I have went to New Horizon's site and they have so many different courses. I was thinking about Linux +. I have never worked with Linux, so I need to know the basics of how it works, installing it (possibly with Windows OS), trouble shooting & managing it on a network. Any suggestions would be of great help. Thanks in advance.

Bob2001
 
Probably not what you are looking for but I would say dive right in. I didn't know anything about Linux, and i started with a Sunblade 150 with Gentoo Linux. I learned so much about the basics, compiling kernel and xfree in like 1 month of fooling around. www.gentoo.org has great documentation too. It is text based install, but if you want something like Windows to start off with i would suggest the Fedora distro.
www.distrowatch.com is a great place to find all the different ones out there. Then i would look for classes after you have a basic grasp of it. Just my 2 cents though :)
 
Great advice!

I landed my first IT job (internship really) as a jr. sysadmin. The network I managed was converting from redhat to gentoo (on 8 servers and 8 workstations). I knew absolutely nothing about linux at the time. Gentoo really taught me a lot in just a few weeks.

I also; got some books about linux, played around with redhat in my spare time at home, forced myself to read linux-only forums for awhile (justlinux.com), took a unix course at my local community college, attended Linux Users Group (LUG) meetings for a few weeks, wrote simple shell scripts for practice, and setup a mockup of the network I intended to administrate- gateway (packet-filtering, NAT, DNS), file-serving (NFS and Samba), mail, DNS, NIS, DHCP, amanda (automated incremental back-up), ftp, apache.

There are a good dozen core services to understand how to setup if using linux for a network server, in addition to getting used to it as a desktop. It will take a month or two before you start feeling more comfortable with it, and a lot of that is unlearning the windows way of things. By six months you should be fairly proficient.

Just beware that some distros have their own way of doing things, so if you study say redhat/fedora intensely you'll actually learn how redhat/fedora does things and not how linux does things. For this reason, its good to try a few distros so you have a better perspective. Flexibility is very important, and so is the ability to look-up information and apply it.

One final tip that's been of great use to me- find yourself a live CD like Knoppix and get used to using it for rescue/recovery. If a linux system is ever unbootable, a linux live CD can save your bacon.
 
Is that sarcasim:D ? Because the Operating System class at my school is crap :( I(student) is teaching the CS teacher how to compile the kernel on the Sunblade 150s they bought and couldn't figure out how to install linux on.
 
The OS class in most schools isn't about how to use & run an OS, they're generally general theoretical stuff about how OS internals work. Basic intro to Unix is seldom a class, if your expected to use Unix machines, they'll just roll it into some intro CS class, and expect you to learn as you go along.


As for accademics not being up on adminstration, that is because they're scientists and not administrators; you don't see professors cleaning toilets because the school has custodial staff. They don't deal with compiling kernels because the school hires computer admins...

Now, why were they installing Linux on Sun Blades in the first place? there's very little reason to shell out the $$$ for Sun hardware if you want to run Linux; x86 hardware is cheaper & faster, even for 64-bit units...
 
IS dept. is separate to the academic part of the university. I think is was a grant of some kind, Sun gave them and exceptional deal i think it was buy one get one free. Linux on a sunblade, i know...i think its stubborness to a point, didn't seem happy when i mentioned it wasn't a GUI install nor genkernel.
 
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