Linux

[Neutron]

Due to learning VMWare, plus wanting to make myself more marketable, I'm going to learn Linux whether it kills me or not, lol.

What would the best distro be? I know this is a question of debate.

I was looking at Ubuntu. Is that a good one to learn on?

My machine is a Core2Duo with 4GB of RAM. I'm going to get a new hard drive for this to keep it separate from my Vista install.

 

[Smith P.]

Good enough for yourself; in case if you heading corporate environment start using RHEL.

 

[navychop]

What ever happened to Xandros? Right after I installed it on someone's machine, it seems to have disappeared.

 

[VinceT3]

ubuntu is the easiest to work with and get setup.. I've tried a few different version.. ubuntu seems to be the linux most are choosing now a days (for personal use)..

 

[haertig]

I was looking at Ubuntu. Is that a good one to learn on?

It depends on what you intend to learn, and your computer skills.

To me, "learning Linux" does not mean only learning how to use it at the GUI level. The use of a Linux GUI is similar enough to Windows that you should be able to guess your way through the mechanics of it. Finding things and figuring out what does what is not difficult.

Learning Linux command line will teach you much more. Given that knowledge it doesn't matter if you walk up to a Ubuntu system, or Fedora, or Debian, or Slackware, or whatever. Say for example you wanted to add a new user, you wouldn't need to search around the GUI to find some type of user administration tool. You'd just go to the command line and run "useradd". It's there on all the distros. GUIs just put a pretty point-click face on top of command line stuff that does the real work.

You can learn command line on any Linux distro. Ubuntu would be fine and is very popular. If you are already comfortable with the command line in an OS (even Windows has a rudimentary one), and you want to learn Linux with a leaning towards it's sibling Unix (Solaris, HPUX, etc.) then you might want to consider Slackware. I would not go for Slackware as your first distro if your only experience is in Windows. You might be able to do it, but you would probably struggle at first. Slackware doesn't hold your hand and guide you along like Ubuntu would.

There is no reason NOT to recommend Ubuntu as a first distro IMHO. However, dig in there and use it's command line, don't just limit yourself to the GUI. Treat the GUI as your fallback when you can't learn what you need to do from the command line in a timely fashion.

Head over to LinuxQuestions.org for excellent help getting to know Linux. The forums are very good over there.

 

[mike123abc]

adduser? How modern... Why not vipw, mkdir, chown, ... the old fashioned way

 

[JAG72]

I would have to say that if you are wanting to market yourself to the corporate world you would want to work with Red Hat or SUSE as your distribution. I would also recommend that you only use the GUI when you absolutely can not figure out how to do it via the command line. Even at that I would ask the questions on how to do it prior to using the GUI as if you are in a corporate environment trying to admin a server you will most likely never have the GUI installed onto the system.

The other question I have for you is why do you want to keep the Linux VM on its own hard drive. It should make no difference with Vista on where the VM is located. Just allocate enough space to the virtual at the beginning and you should have not problems.

 

[haertig]

You could also start learning Linux using a "LiveCD" distro. You boot directly from the CD and don't have to install anything. There are many of these - Knoppix is good. Ubuntu can run off a LiveCD also. Many more. When you're done with the days learning, reboot and you're back in your normal OS.

You said you have 4Gb of ram. When you boot from a LiveCD you have the option of loading everything into RAM. The entire operating system. 4Gb is more than enough for this. You OS will run like a scalded ape totally out of ram. You won't believe how fast. It takes longer to boot this way because everything has to be read off the CD and moved to ram. But once it's there - wow! Contrast this to running directly off a LiveCD. It works, but it can get slow at times when the OS has to go read the CD (CD access is a slow operation).

You can try many different LiveCDs to decide which distro you like the best. I only costs you the time/effort to download and burn a CD. You ALWAYS want a LiveCD sitting around anyways. That is your first-class ticket to repair a broken system. Whether that system is Windows or Linux.

 

[haertig]

adduser? How modern... Why not vipw...

Nnnaaahhh... Real men don't use vipw. Direct "ed" on /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow is the way to go! ;-)

Of course, given this type of "real men" work, you BETTER have that LiveCD sitting around!

 

[JAG72]

You ALWAYS want a LiveCD sitting around anyways. That is your first-class ticket to repair a broken system. Whether that system is Windows or Linux.

Now none of us have ever had to do that before have we.

 

[mike123abc]

Nnnaaahhh... Real men don't use vipw. Direct "ed" on /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow is the way to go! ;-)

Of course, given this type of "real men" work, you BETTER have that LiveCD sitting around!

never had to do much with ed, we always had xed, the extended ed to work with. Since we had 50 people on one computer, vi was something discouraged since it ate way too many resources. Of course as root you could always set your priority up a tiny bit to make vi run smoothly...

 

[Hall]

You said you have 4Gb of ram. When you boot from a LiveCD you have the option of loading everything into RAM. The entire operating system. 4Gb is more than enough for this. You OS will run like a scalded ape totally out of ram. You won't believe how fast.

Do you have to specify that at boot or does it load what it can based on the amount of RAM available ? My wife's laptop has 2gb of RAM and I had Ubuntu's LiveCD running last night and was disappointed in the speed. It was accessing too much off of the CD....

 

[Hall]

What ever happened to Xandros? Right after I installed it on someone's machine, it seems to have disappeared.

Linux distros come and go weekly.... In my experience, don't go for the "newest and coolest" distro that's out at the moment. Let it mature and see if it will be around for longer than 6 months to a year. I've ran (and tried) a number over the years starting with RedHat 5 (around '95 or '96), then Mandrake (newbies won't know that name), Debian, Gentoo, and most recently toyed with Ubuntu.

 

[haertig]

Do you have to specify that at boot or does it load what it can based on the amount of RAM available ?

It is a boot time option that you specify on each boot. The default is to run from CD. Generally you don't want to run directly from ram unless you have 1Gb (which you're covered for). 2Gb or 4Gb are plenty.

I do not know what the "cheat code" (that's what boot time options are sometimes called) is for Ubuntu to load to ram. I would guess "toram". That's what it is for Knoppix. You might try searching Google. I just searched Google for "knoppix cheat codes" and came up with this nice Wiki: Cheat Codes - Knoppix Documentation Wiki . I didn't see such a nice concise Wiki for Ubuntu, but I didn't try to refine my Google search looking for that.

I would ask your question on the Ubuntu specific forum over at LinuxQuestions.org

 

[Hall]

Due to learning VMWare, plus wanting to make myself more marketable, I'm going to learn Linux whether it kills me or not, lol.

What would the best distro be? I know this is a question of debate.

I suspect a Linux-centric company will be far more interested in someone with core *Unix* skills vs "GUI" skills. Ubuntu, for example, won't "teach" you much about Linux. It's just too Windows-like and user-friendly. You need to know how to write shell scripts, use command-line programs, and so on. Of course, you can do all of this with Ubuntu, Redhat, SUSE, and so on. You just have to remember that once the pretty GUI is loaded, hit "CRTL+ALT+F1".

 

[Hall]

I do not know what the "cheat code" (that's what boot time options are sometimes called) is for Ubuntu to load to ram. I would guess "toram".

Don't worry, I can find it.... I do recall trying a LiveCD of some other distro-of-the-month a long time ago and it seems to me that it loaded into RAM by default. It was *blazingly fast* !! I'd tried LiveCDs later and was really disappointed in how slow they were. They certainly wouldn't entice anyone to leave Windows, that's for sure.

 

[LER]

you need to more learn the Unix command-line way of doing things, and then any *nix like OS (Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, etc) will seem familiar.

The system administration side of the house is different, but similar on all of them.

Get comfortable with Shell scripts, PERL, awk, sed, grep, etc.

 

[navychop]

Linux distros come and go weekly.... In my experience, don't go for the "newest and coolest" distro that's out at the moment. Let it mature and see if it will be around for longer than 6 months to a year. I've ran (and tried) a number over the years starting with RedHat 5 (around '95 or '96), then Mandrake (newbies won't know that name), Debian, Gentoo, and most recently toyed with Ubuntu.

After doing a little searching, I've learned that Xandros did a deal with M$ and is lowly regarded by the rest of the Open Source community. Just M$ trying to strong arm people by claiming code infringement. And a little guy fell into line.

Shame. It was pretty easy to get up and running. I guess I might get Ubuntu and load it on an old laptop. Probably just use it for Chat Chats!

 

[torp74]

Mepis 7.0 is a great mix of style, grace and power,

torp

 

[badhat]

This is my opinion only but if you intend to learn system administration I wouldn't install X at all. Only install the base system with Apache, MySQL, PHP, BIND, Python, Postfix... etc. Then you can rely on google to learn how to administer these different servers and software. Another good and highly recommended option is finding a Linux Users Group in your area and attend some meetings. As far as which flavor to choose one has already been told to you Redhat Enterprise Linux. There is one free RHEL alternative, that I know of, that was spun off of RHEL 3. It's called White Box Enterprise Linux. Also, you can get the same Redhat taste.. as far as config file locations and file system structure via Fedora Core. As you may already know alot of larger businesses when using a *nix pay for the support of the OS. As far as I know Redhat had the most comprehensive support possible and is what made it so popular. As someone said earlier but not in these exact words Linux is Linux. So no matter the distribution you choose you are still going to be learning Linux. My distribution of choice is Gentoo. And from me to you it is not a good first time Linux experience. I would recommend what I said earlier for Redhat type experience or go for Ubuntu. Ubuntu has a cheerful hyper-active community. Oh and one last thing.. you are never going to get the proper performance experience using a Live CD. A Live CD is limited to the speed of your CD-ROM drive so you really don't ever want to use that to judge.