A rather "sensitive" question to u slack community.
 

I'm taking a Cisco CCNA course, and was discussing linux with my tutor.. I told him that i was using Slack, and that Slack really teaches you the inner workings of linux etc etc... And he aggrees... (i was mainly asking him about what linux certifications i can take out there)

However, he noted that although Slack is a very good distro, most of the businesses out there use Redhat ... And saying i know how to use "redhat" instead of "slackware" would increase my chance of ... well of convincing the employer that i can manage myself with linux.

He also recommended that i should try out Fedora as a secondary distro.

What are your views on this? And what linux certification would you recommend me to take? Mind you, one which would have a weight in employment (particularly network administration)

Well yeah thats pretty much true. Most enterprises go for red hat, slackware has no 'official' support. Still as close to 'true'/vanilla linux as you can get without doing LFS.

So you'd recommend a Redhat certification then?

I would argue that once you really learn one distro, it wouldn't take much to learn redhat.

That's true, but its a bit difficault convincing a company without a piece of paper saying "certification passed" =/

agreed. Those papers are pretty useful. My point, though, is that you need not switch to redhat permanently. Unless you're actively persuing a cert right away, stay with what you like, and to prepare, set up a machine with redhat and do all that stuff for the redhat cert.

The reason is that Redhat markets support, not really the software. I believe that it would be easier for someone with a Slackware background to learn Redhat then vis versa.
And who knows, you might be the only one in the class or the workplace that knows how to get things working when the X server crashes and the scripts need to be edited by hand.

For linux certifications, start here:

LPI

Then go here:

Comptia

Then start focusing on the distros that you are talking about, namely:

Redhat

Good luck man!

- JJ

Meh. If it gets you a job you want, take the RedHat course. You'll pretty much know what's going on, and you just pick up the quirks of the distro.

You might want to check the job market and some companies where you would like to work. Do some informational interviews. Not everyone uses red hat and not all administrators who do hiring think you have to previously have used red hat to hire you (even if that is what they are using).

In my opinion LPI is the best first certification. It is not distribution dependent. Red Hat or Sage would be good for a second one.

If you can get ahold of another cheap PC use two distros. Red Hat is okay but you will want to learn other ones as well.

I don't get it.


Slackware is one of the most "hands on" linux distros out there (it's been some years since I've used it, though), and if one can install it and compile source codes of every utility in it and configure all the hardware modules and startup scripts and configuration files files in "/etc" to get stuff to work, then using redhat/fedora/mandrake/debian should be a cinch, since the only significant differences between different distros is in the features of the shipped kernel, relatively minor variations in the organisation of the shared libraries, the collection and dependency structure/tracking/installing of prebuilt rpms/debs (which slackware doesn't have, granted) and a few GUI's (also, the boot Cd kernels/ramdisks can vary, with some having more drivers for different types of hardware, like Mandrake & Knoppix (their boot CD's could detect my scsi controller and video card, and load up the modules Fedora & Debian's couldn't, and their /lib/modules/blabla did not even have the needed drivers). These are little things for somebody who'll be using linux professionally. Thus, if you can use a powerful distro like slackware, you should be able to use just about any distro. Employers who want linux-literate people should know that, (why would they want or care about linux people if they are not aware of it's abilities and so these most basic concepts about linux anyways? Most companies in the Bay Area in the US, for instance, barring a few honorable exceptions, consist total idiot yuppies who make lame excuses to use windows for networking (WTF?!?!?!) and development but really do so because of their cretinous principle of fashionable wastage of money on closed-source stuff ).

End of rant.


AR

Moved to Linux-Cerifications. Not a Slackware question.

Heh, my apologies, didn't know Linux - certification forum existed..

Thanks all, will have a look at the websites.

Two big things that are different between slack and Redhat:

1 system V init scripts --- slack uses BSD style init scripts which is basically many scripts that form together into one large, well commented startup scipt. System V is much more complicated. (No easy one liner for System v lol)

2 RPMs -- rpm packages are very different from tgz packages. TGZ's are very plain-jane -- so they dont create as many dependency problems. Get used to researching dependencies (Its always a good idea regardless of distro-- we slackers tend to, well... slack when it comes to depenancies)



Some minor things include -- redhat uses patched kernels so their behavior will be a little different then what you expect. Also the directory structure is a little different, /usr/sbin vs /use/local/sbin etc....



Now for an editorial -- I think slackware should be the first distro anyone uses. Slack uses plain packages, plain kernels, unix directory structure, and minimal dependencies. Slackware is set-up succeed, not fail. It is elegant simplicity. It installs quickly with little frustration. Slackware is so simple that when it breaks it can almost always be fixed. It makes people very comfortable with the command line, It doesnt even boot to X (not untill you edit initab ;-)).

Slack really doesnt teach Linux -- slack teaches slack. Slack does however teach unix logic-- which can be applied to any Linux.


Enough rambling -- You will do well with RedHat.


:)

You mention getting LPI first and then the Comptia one. What if you have CompTIA already, would you recomend LPI anyways?