Complete Beginner to LINUX
 

Hello, I am new to Linux, I have installed Ubuntu in a dual boot, I got it since it was the most talked about linux distro, but now with more searching I found I could have chosen Zorin or Mint. I want to be a programmer and am not some just regular pc user. Any advice will be really usefull, since I can't even play a mp3 song in Ubuntu's default player, I got VLc from sofware center, that helps, but how do I get all codecs and everything ready, Please advice.

So to clarify do you want to know about programming? Or do you want to get your MP3 player working?

If your system supports a free virtual machine, then I'd consider it.
There is little need to change distro's to be a programmer. One is just as good as the other for the most part.
The help pages on Ubuntu describe how to add in mp3 support but it could be other issues.

Welcome to this community. Getting codecs commanline way and Gui way.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RestrictedFormats
http://askubuntu.com/questions/17102...g-media-codecs
https://apps.ubuntu.com/cat/applicat...ricted-extras/

Thanks for the replies guys, and for @sag47, I play music in VLC now in Ubuntu, so thats not an issue. My main need is to know things like how to use linux to the fullest, and for a direct answer to your question, I want to become a programmer, a know a little of Java, and started learning C. So any help will be really appreciated. :D

Since you want to learn programming and didn’t indicate your level of knowledge in this area, here is one place you could start: http://www.linuxtopia.org/online_boo...ing_index.html.

Before anybody else does (a bit of a site joke) I will heartily recommend Slackware as a good starting point. It takes more thought than Abound but it is so much more flexible and the scripts you use to install packages can be used to learn the syntax.
I am lazy, so I use Debian, but if you want to spend your time learning about Linux go for Gentoo, Slackware, LFS and others listed by members after my post.

I think you would be interested in this post. It covers a lot of topics in Linux and where to start as well as some programming stuff later in the thread. Also, recently this post I made on security has a lot of good content for learning how to be more paranoid on Linux.

I don't think you need to change distro unless you see some performance issues with your current installation. All the tools you need for developing code are available for all distributions, so stay with Ubuntu for now. Besided Linux Mint and Zorin OS are Ubuntu derivatives.

For playing multimedia files in Ubuntu you had to choose to allow third party software to be installed during installation. if you didnt you still can install it by copying this on your terminal

type your password and press enter (You wont see the characters of your password being typed is it a security thing, so nobody stand behind your back looking at your password)

Once is done copy this other line of code

Thanks for the info guys, @penguiniator , what did you mean by by level of knowledge, plz elaborate, i didn't get you.

Slackware +1. It is said that you learn Slackware, you learn Linux. Can confirm.

Regarding the programming part - if you want to learn to program, then the OS must be out of your way. You need to be able to concentrate on the programming. After having worked 12 years as a professional programmer, I can say that the professional programming rarely targets Linux desktop platform. In web development the server are usually Linux but development platform is irrelevant - usually standard Windows boxes from where you deploy your software to the server. Same with embedded development - Android development again often done on Windows boxes where you deploy the software to an emulator or real device. Embedded development does not require Linux usually. Therefore having Linux as a pre-requisite to programming is wrong. You can learn to program on any platform.

For example lots of enterprises that use industrial handhelds are based on Windows CE and development to that is done purely on Windows and in Visual Studio. Language of choice in there is C++ with MFC framework or perhaps C# with .NET Compact Framework.

Good analogy - do you want to learn how to fix cars or do you want to become driver. It is good to have a necessity to mess under the hood if you want to be a mechanic. If you want to earn money with the car however, it must be rock solid and you want to spend minimal amount of time under the hood.

Therefore think what do you want to do? Tinker with OS or learn to program. It is hard to do both at the same time. If you want to know about Linux, then go with it but leave the programming part at rest for now until you have reasonable fluency in Linux and you have it stable. If you want to program first, then I recommend some other platform than Linux where you can have a working environment in no time. Linux is a tinkerers OS and that is not good when you want to focus on programming.

Good analogy is the comparison between the mechanic and the driver. If you want to be a good mechanic, then it is good to own a car which requires messing under the hood every once in a while. However if you want to be a driver, you really want the car that is rock solid and works out of the box with minimal effort so that you can focus on driving and the task at hand instead of figuring out how to get that car running again.

Thanks for the reply @wigry, see, as for what i do in my comp, i listen to music, play games, watch movies and tv shows, download books to read in my tab, and finally, i program. I am a beginner, learnt Java till the basics, can do all stack queue and linked list part, nothing more, am learning C, but i want to learn more. As for linux, playing any media in VLC and using transmission to download stuff, is nothing, so what is it that i need to know about linux ??

For you, it sounds like the most important things that you would want to know is how to navigate your filesystem to find your downloads, install software for handling them, and update programs to keep things up to date. A beginner tutorial should work just fine for you, and then use google to look up any additional needs you may have.

Programming
 

If the platform for learning programming does not matter, then Linux has an advantage. Its programming tools are free. Visual studio costs several hundred dollars, which is a large investment to make just to learn a skill that may or may not become a vocation. Adjusting to using Visual Studio later is not a big leap to make, if it ever becomes necessary at all. Stability on Linux is not hard to achieve and the desktop is easy enough to learn. This is not an obstacle to learning programming.

The knowledge of Linux is very very wide. If person declares to be competent to be in linux that may mean many many different things. Home usage is one thing, enterprise RAID's clustering advanced file systems etc are another things. Probably the best for you is to poke around in the file system and for example in the case of Ubuntu, try to find out where and how the X is configured for example, how the DNS works, are there any caches, how to enable/disable them, how to fine tune the boot-up process, how to list what processes are running, figure put what each process does, do you need them all? How to turn off unnecessary ones etc etc. Lots of things to explore. Mostly towards customization and effeciency. Ultimate would be how to recompile your own kernel with custom options that is finely tuned to your specific computer. And thats where the choice of Linux distro comes in. Ubuntu makes it quite hard to do all I just described. Ubuntu is like a closed black box that is not meant for easy tinkering. Slackware is on the other side of the spectrum having everything exposed and available for tuning.

About programming you need to figure out what you want to do, some application. Making linked lists work and shuffling data around is all nice, but the purpose of programming is to make a functional program. Do you want to program web, create mobile apps, create desktop apps, write something for embedded controllers (Arduino, Rasperry Pi) or perhaps robotics (Lego Mindstorm)? So figure out the goal and start moving towards it. Randomly trying out different languages is not beneficial. Also when you want to start make living out of programming one day, it is good to have something working to demonstrate.

Regarding the Visual Studio, the Express edition is available for everybody for free.