I'm a newbie to Linux. I've worked a little with Solaris, but by no means am I anything but a newbie. I've worked as a M$ admin for the past 6 or so years and worked on the hardware side of the house prior to that. I'm getting bored with M$ and want to learn Linux. I mean really learn it.

I've got several computers at my disposal to load up. These range from a 300 MHz 40 Meg, to a 733MHz with 128 Meg. There's also 2 in the middle but I don't know right off the specs. I have Red Hat 8 loaded on one of the 733 machines and have played around with that for the past month. I've gone thru one of the "teach yourself" type of book. However, it left me wanting more.

From what I remember from my Solaris days, the real power of the UNIX-like OS is at the comman prompt. The book I went thru concentrated on the GUI side. So what I'm looking for is a really good book or 2 to REALLY teach me how Linux works. I have downloaded the Rute User's Guide and that seems pretty good so far. Anyone have any suggestions for me?

In case this isn't enough, I would like to eventually move on to LFS, but think I'm far from that point. I will eventually take some of the certifications, but that's far down on my list. My main goal is to learn as much as I can about Linux.

Thanks in advance to any suggestions that you all offer.

F_M

this might be of interest to you...

http://tille.soti.org/training/tldp/

Hi Fritz - welcome to LQ.

Rute's is an excellent start. also take a look at the docs at the redhat and mandrake sites for well-written guides. be sure to check www.tldp.org - there's enough there to keep you busy for a *long* time

there are also a lot of docs usually installed with most distros, check /usr/doc

and of course don't forget the man pages: type "man <command>" for the definitive documentation and all available options for each command.

Great links. Thanks for these. I'll start reading.

Are there any books that are sort of a tutorial for the command line?

F_M

P.S. I just ordered the hard copy of Rute's and the LFS.

"A Practical Guide to Linux" by Mark G. Sobell. The local community college uses it as the textbook for their Unix/Linux course.

Went to Amazon to read the reviews and ended up buying this book. This Mark Sobell must really know how to get his point across. I don't think I saw a rating of one of his books at less than 4 stars. So, I think I'm well on my way to where I want to go. I will probably want to get a couple more distros, and I won't be downloading any multi disk distros on this slow 56 k connection.

Anyone have any good or bad experiences with any sources of CDs? Do the purchases of distros from the various shops on-line benefit only the shop that sells it, or does the developer get some of that cash?

F_M

If you really want to unleash the raw power of Linux, my reccomendation is to avoid RPM-based distros (Mandrake, Redhat, Fedora, SuSE, etc..) and go with a source-based distro (Slack, Gentoo, etc..). Want an easy-to-learn-but-still-requires-intellect source based distro? I'd choose slackware.. I'll never go back...

I agree with the above if you are learning just a personal OS to tinker around with yourself.. However.. IF you are looking to support linux in an enterprise (which it sounds like you will end up wanting to do) then march straight ahead and learn the rpm crap, no enterprise will ever run slackware or gentoo on the desktop.

btw.. Slackware is my perferred distro too

while i will always support the ease and user friendliness of suse, slackware is an excellent distro...i learned on suse, i learned more on slackware....lol.

for cd's, check out

http://www.cheapbytes.com

they're affordable, offer almost any flavor you could want and i've never had a problem with them, and they're pretty quick to get it to your door...

Sounds like you committed and have some time to spend on this, so you may want to look at Linux From Scratch as well. What better way to learn an OS than to build your own straight from source? I also highly recommend Slackware. As far as where to buy the CDs goes, I guess that depends on where you get them. Most of your garden variety stores like Staples & Office max would carry genuine disk sets that came from the developer, but alot of those bargin basement online stores produce their own from ISOs downloaded for free, so you may want to order them from the developer.

also, as to purchasing, consider buying install disks from the distributions themselves -- the price may be higher, but it's a good way to directly contribute to projects you support.

Thanks for all this input. I am committed to learning as much as I can about Linux. As stated before, my main goal is to learn this, but I will use it as some stepping stones in my career.

Not entirely sure how much is will help, career-wise, I work for companies supporting the federal government, and the agency I support uses strictly Windows and Solaris. I don't see them moving to any flavor of Linux any time soon. The reason is that everything that goes on our network is reviewed by security first. Now I know that Linux is more secure than the other O/Ses, but because of the MANY different flavors out there, the security folks aren't willing to tackle the daunting job. I'm sure that there is the mindset that Linux is for hackers, too. So that makes it a PR thing as well.

However, I recently interviewed for a new position supporting this same agency and was asked about my experience with Red Hat, so there's a sign that things are changing.

Since I want to learn about it, I will probably go with Slackware. But not entirely sure. Someone mentioned Linux From Scratch. I ordered the book and CD combo the other day from Cheapbytes.com I'm going to put that on the shelf above the computer I'm using to learn and when I feel I've learned a bunch, I'm going to attempt that. I also feel that the best way to know how things work is to start from scratch and build it yourself. But that's a couple months down the line.

Thanks for the info on the on-line stores. I figured that they were just downloading and selling the CDs, but didn't know for sure. I would think there would be a couple out there that actually give back to the developers, aren't there? Since I'm going to use the product that they put so much time and effort into, I should pay them something. If nothing else, I guess I could hit that donate to the cause button.

F_M