I've been around computers my whole life. My dad was a computer contractor. But even though he hated microsoft the one thing he used by them was windows, and I never saw linux until i was 16. I can use dos 1.1 to windows xp, and if i spent time finding everything on vista it would be a peice of cake. But I'm still slightly inexperienced with linux, I can do the basics like mount, unmout, dd, use vi, wget, apt-get, etc. And I've figured out that in place of a registry it has an etc folder, and all the logs are in the var, binaries in bin, etc. but what is the boot sequence, how do i get linux without debian, redhat, slackware or any other packages, just the basics, and make it only have what I want start from scratch and install network drivers and a package manager. Or eventually I'd like to know how to build the kernel. I'm decent with c code and a the internet as my reference but i have no clue where to start when there are a couple hundred files and you can only tell the compiler to compile one(which branches off to the rest). Is there anywhere I can learn this without ether spending hundreds of hours dissecting linux on my own or paying alot of money and getting certified?

Hi -

You sound like a very bright guy; I don't think you'll have any trouble with Linux regardless of how you approach it.

And that's precisely the difficulty in giving you a direct answer: there are *many* different ways to approach Linux (much more so than DOS/Windows), but there's not necessarily any "one best way". It all depends on what you're interested in doing with the OS.

For whatever it's worth, I'd suggest two approches:

1. Look through your GUI package manager (Synaptic, Yast - whatever), browse through packages that look interesting (Games, compilers, multimedia tools - whatever) and just play with a couple of them.

2. If you're interested in "Linux fundamentals" (which, I emphasize, are *not* necessarily essential to have fnu/be productive with Linux), here's a good tutorial:

http://www.linux.org/lessons/beginner/toc.html

'Hope that helps .. PSM

Well, my reply was going to be the same as klearview's: if you go through Linux from Scratch/Beyond linux from scratch, you'll know a lot (more than me...). So that route is highly recommended for learning the internals.

The other approach would be to say 'this month I want to learn, say, iptables'. You then engage your favourite search engine and look for tutorials and how-tos on the subject of the month and try to do a project based around it.

Which approach is best depends on whether you want 'inner-learning' (learning of the internals) or 'outer-learning' (learning of the programs and environment). You probably should want to do some of each, unless you want to be, eg, a kernel hacker.