Hello there everyone. I know you must be wondering this is same repeated thread, but it's not. I have gone through those and its really confusing coz I don't know anything about linux. I will give you full deatil of my problem:
I am using XP right now. I'm doing my CCNA and after that want to do RHCE certification. So i have decided to bring a new hard-disk and install linux or ubuntu in that as I want to get familiar with the linux environment first before I proceed to my certification. So I need advice what all things should I do ,so that i really get my hands on Linux. It's ok for me even if it takes ,more than 2-3 months.

Can anyone help me out what all are the things I should know?
How can I learn well and master it or atleast become a moderate in it?
what are the things I should remeber before install and after that?
I know I have missed many things so can you say what more the things?
Where can i find more books n this?Actually i need the exact keyword for this so i didn't googled it till now!

Regards,
Prajit. G. Nair

If you really want to learn you should first start by understand linux basics for example how to use vi or nono, move files, copy files ect.

Besure to read your distro documentation.

Not sure if you have done that yet but if you have then good job =)

If you want to learn it well, I'd recommend at list glancing through "info coreutils" and "info bash". OpenGroup.org allows you to read Single Unix Specification (coincides with POSIX) - it can also be a useful reading, because while Linux+GNU userspace, *BSD and some other unix-like OSes may have some differences, the basic system under the hood tries to follow POSIX in most cases.

If you're going to go for RHCE, get Centos (free version of RHEL). You need to know it well.

RHCE:
http://www.redhat.com/certification/rhce/
http://www.redhat.com/certification/rhce/prep_guide/


I recommend these to bookmark/read:

1. Linux vs MS comparison
http://linux.oneandoneis2.org/LNW.htm

2. Linux at cmd line; you REALLY need to be able to work at this level.
http://rute.2038bug.com/index.html.gz
http://tldp.org/LDP/Bash-Beginners-G...tml/index.html
http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/

RHEL 5 Install & Admin/Deployment guides
http://www.linuxtopia.org/online_boo...ide/index.html
http://www.linuxtopia.org/online_boo...ion/index.html

just download linux pdfs,CBT and ebooks from the net. But if you want books, try O'reilly books
if you don't want to dual boot OS, you can always use virtualization softwares, such as virtualbox, vmware

things to learn


1.basic commands (cp,mv,ls,rm,useradd,su ...) and location e.g /etc (config files) /bin (binary files)
2.text editor (vi,pico,nano) i recommend vi
3.implement services by knowing its concept..e.g. DNS, you need to know A record,MX,PTR etc.

as long as you know the commands and know to edit config files, you are heading the right way.

good luck

I have heard about this word distro in this forum many times. Can you explain what is that exactly means?

I really didn't understand anything. What exactly all these terms means?A little detail explanation?

I have heard of this virtualization softwares..but how much space do u need for that? and is it really safe for the hard disk too?

Welcome to the world of Penguin!!

Linux is not as difficult as a normal Windows user would imagine!!

And when you ask a question on this board, it helps a lot to specify what kind of distribution. You chose the most popular distribution at the moment!! Ubuntu. I am using Slackware 13.0 at the moment.

Did Ubuntu install all the device drivers for you, or does it feel like you must install all of them separately?

Get yourself familiar with well-known desktop enviornments such as KDE and GNOME. When you log onto your Ubuntu very likely you will be logged on with a KDE.

(I recently won the award of silliest question ever been asked on LQ with "How can I build an image search engine?")

The best way to learn linux is to get your hands dirty. Get the hard drive, keep it for linux only so that no matter how many times you need to reformat it you will not lose your data.
Get some books online, read them and at the same time try those commands and compare what you get and what is expected.
If you are going for RHCE certification then you are better off with CentOS rather than Ubuntu. There are quite a few differences in the distributions. Not at core but how they do it. So there are different files, file names and locations.
But first get the OS, install it and try to use it as much as possible. Before going on to learn administration, learn the basics like editors, file commands, changing the ownerships and permissions and all. Get familiar with the OS and then move ahead.
There are a lot of books available in the market that will help you. You can even get the books at cheaper rates in the seconds market. There are people who do not know the value of books and put it on sale.

Welcome to LQ though.

<<mod edit: Put this in quotes for clarity>>

you can try Sun Virtual Box under GNU license (GNU is Not Unix! which means you can use for free) from www.virtualbox.org

If you are planning to run Ubuntu while running XP, I recommend setting aside about 3 GB with 300 MB SWAP, and configure so it uses about 512 MB of RAM.

However, what's unfortunate about Sun Virtual Box is once you configure it to take 512 MB, it will constantly be taking 512 MB of your memory, regardless of how many programs or how few programs you are running under your Ubuntu. Also, you cannot access your Windows partition while running Ubuntu as a guest operating system.

Dear senior member,
get books and online info. is all very well, done it myself, but you tend to get stuck at various points (esp., if you are not mathematically minded) but you know that the command line offers you a quicker and better recourse to what you want but it is a tad unforgiving..
I hate to bring up this topic but using Notepad is easy for us numpties. Using VI,VIM,gvim or cream begins to look like a lever into bash and something you would use as a programmer. Yes there are sites that tell you how to use the basics but little to tell you the relationship between the >2 so what is the vi for except edit a package that will or will not work otherwise.

Fred.

In you installed system there are many layers. The inner one is the kernel - what gets booted by your bootloader, and what handles all the technical details about the very notion of a "running task". It handles other things like device drivers too in Linux. This kernel is what actually is named Linux. The kernel is what bootloader actually boots.

Then there are basic low-level libraries and utilities. While parts of kernel are supposed to work with hardware, basic libraries are supposed to call kernel for such tasks. They already suppose that there is such thing as a notion of file - named data storage. Most of the low-level libraries and often-used small utility program in the Linux distributions are taken from the GNU project. These are utilities like "cp" which is invoked via command line to copy files.

There are other kernels and other sets of userspace libraries designed around the same basic notions. For example, FreeBSD project provides an OS distribution with its own kernel and own core libraries/utilities.

There are some standards specifying what you should be able to expect from those libraries and utilities. Currently, the most well-known ones, POSIX (portable operating system interface) and SUS (single Unix specification) are actually the same. You can read it on http://opengroup.org. Many systems try to adhere to it as well as possible, but not all are succesful in this.. OpenSolaris seems to be fully compliant, Linux, NetBSD, FreeBSD and OpenBSD are generally close to POSIX.

There is some documentation on specific GNU versions of basic libraries ant utilities. To be able to work efficiently in command line you could use "info bash" and "info coreutils" commands: each of them will launch a console documentation reader; first comand displays documentation of the shell itself, which interprets your commands; the second one displays documentation of the package of the basic utilities.

@ everyone:
Thanks a lot for your answers. So I am planning to buy new hard disk now. Now the first question is which version or which OS I should use to study? as I also wanna do my RHCE in future! Should I proceed with ubuntu and then CentOS? or directly CentOS?
Second I have seen a lot of books with good rating here in this forum. which one will suite me as complete newbie according to you? And should the book be respective of that OS only? example if im installing the ubuntu, then book should be of ubuntu only and not linux?or it is okay?

That depends on your general aptitude at learning computer things.

Centos is definitely harder for a beginner to learn than Ubuntu. But it still isn't very very hard. If your ability to learn computer things is too weak to jump straight into Centos, then you probably won't do well at whatever work you hope to find with that RHCE.

If you learn Ubuntu first, that would be any easier introduction to many general Linux concepts that would still apply in Centos. But it also would involve learning a lot of Debian concepts that you would need to unlearn for Red Hat. Ubuntu is based on Debian. Centos is almost exactly Red Hat. Debian and Red Hat are far different (within the range that Linux can differ from Linux).