Hello

I have many years of experience with DOS and Windows, but this is my first dabble in Linux, in particular Fedora 13. The OS is great, but my lack of knowledge makes me uneasy.

Is there a good book available in HTML or PDF format that covers
the basics, and is relevant to Fedora 13?
Thank you.

Are you familiar with the official fedora documentation here?

Thank you for your suggestion.

I had a look at the documentation, but it seems to be more descriptive than
explanatory. Not being familiar with the jargon works against me.

Fedora works great right out of the box, but it does present minor irritants that require more knowledge than I possess. This being a new system for me, I need to get down to the basic building blocks in order to learn.

keep in minde tha fedora is a R&D testing distro
Great if you do want to learn by " trial by fire" .
but some basics . most every day things have not changed too much ( though fedora likes to change things )
a bit old -- but good place to start
http://rute.2038bug.com/rute.html.gz
http://tldp.org/LDP/Bash-Beginners-G...tml/index.html
http://www.linux.org/lessons/
for Fedora -- the best place
http://www.fedoraforum.org/

dangermouses page
http://www.dnmouse.org/
quick guide page Mjm's
http://www.mjmwired.net/resources/mjm-fedora-f13.html
and last but not least
Google/Linux
http://www.google.com/linux

and then there is go to your local book store ( i use borders )
and get a copy of orialys
"fedora 13 & redhat enterprise Bible " the fedora 12 will do also
seeing as fedora releases a NEW ( and some times VERY different ) version EVERY 6 MONTHS

1 members found this post helpful.

Welcome to the wonderful world of Linux and open-source.

A good resource for persons new to Linux is the About dot com Linux pages. They are oriented towards Ubuntu, but they will likely help with a lot of the jargon and terminology.

Garrels's Introduction to Linux is much more detailed and excellent. I still have a printed copy on my bookshelf. Mr. Garrels writes good manuals.

When I was learning Linux, one of the biggest hurdles was understanding the directory structure, because it's so different from DOS and Windows. Here's a good description.

For day-to-day user,

• the home directory,
• the root directory,
• /etc (configuration and startup files)
• /lib (libraries, sort of equivalent in function to *.dll files)
• /usr (programs),
• /opt (some other programs sometimes),
• /dev (disks, partitions, and removable devices), and
• /mnt and /media (for accessing items in /dev)

are the ones that matter. The rest matter to the OS and to developers, but users seldom have to worry about /var, /proc, /lib unless they are doing heavy-duty trouble-shooting.

Linux is not hard; it's just different.

1 members found this post helpful.

yes. she's female, by the way.

[QUOTE=John VV;4108847]keep in minde tha fedora is a R&D testing distro
Great if you do want to learn by " trial by fire" ./QUOTE]

Another bit of info I wans't aware of. I tried the top five distro's listed
in Distrowatch, but settled on Fedora as it accommodates my vision problems
the best. I don't know enough about Linux to use other selection criteria
at this point.

I will most certainly look at the books you recommended.

Thank you

As you say the world of Linux does appear to be wonderful. I am most impressed by how easily one can become functional in any of the different
versions.

I truly appreciate your response. The difference in file structure is a definite problem, and your excerpt is most useful. I have downloaded Garrel's book, it seems like it may be the most informative at this stage. I will also buy the hard copy to support the author, but due to visual problems the PDF version suits me best.


Thank you.

because of just WHAT fedora is
it's philosophy is to push the code until it breaks , fix it , push it some more -- till the breaking point -

new updates often DO break things . Fedora often uses code that is SO NEW that is is unsupported by the hardware manufactures
an recent example is xorg 1.8
nvidia,ATI did not have a driver for about a month
2 months for the gforce 5 card and a bit longer for the now dead gforce 4 and lower

python 2.6 -- some python 2.5 code will NOT run

so fedora is good IF you like to fix things when they break , and they WILL .
gcc4.4.5
a bunch of slightly older source code( 6 months and older ,2 years and older a big hack) will need some small "hacking" to build with this new version .

Well, it seems like I have beenfixing things all my life. Certainly it was the case with Windows. With Fedora all I can do is hope for the best for a while, as I don['t have the know-how to fix anything right now. I have a couple issues waiting for a fix, such as: F13 not recognizing the floppy drive, and no wired network connection on an intermittent basis, but that can wait. Luckily I use removable hard drives so I can boot to a fresh OS in case of emergency.

I'm glad you mentioned this, it will help me keep a few extra hairs on my head.

John, with all due respect, I take issue with some of your comments. Just my opinions...

IMO Fedora is still a good desktop distro choice for the average person. Are you saying he should try something more newbie friendly like Ubuntu which is often put out with bugs and can break things during updates. Maybe he should install debian stable to be completely safe?

I'm using the nvidia proprietary driver with kmod and I didn't get interrupted.

I haven't had an issue with this (at least yet). At least it's not python3 lol.

Most newbies don't really have to compile code with the thousands of packages available in Fedora. If they do they can get help here and maybe learn something.