Newbie to linux, have a couple of questions
 

I am a newbie to linux even though I have toyed around with linux for a while now. I have a lot of experience using other operating system with my hobby of writing computer programs in the late 80s in DOS and eventually in Windows. I do have some experience with Unix and Linux from my college days but am not as knowledgeable as I am in Windows and would like to know if there are any books or web tutorials that were written for someone who has experience with computers and operating systems. The books I have found on linux have been aimed at people who have never run anything other than windows and probably have no idea what a command prompt is. Is there a good book or tutorial that is aimed at someone who has an extensive computer background but is new to linux? My other question involves upgrading hardware. I have a system that I built myself back in 2003 that has aged to the point that I need to upgrade. I first plan to upgrade my PCI-e video card and my motherboard next. How does linux handle updates to hardward components? Is linux good at finding new hardware during boot-up and making the adjustments and updating drivers? There is always the chance that a new video card or motherboard would be incompatible with my version of linux? If I do upgrade and realize it isn't compatible with linux, is there a way I can find drivers or work arounds for my new hardware? Most hardware vendors don't provide linux drivers and if they do, they may only work with a paid version such as Red Hat. I would appreciate any help. Oh, sorry for the long thread.

Marc

Welcome to LQ!!

Most hardware now is well-supported on Linux--with or without the cooperation of the manufacturers. There are two "safe choices" that I am aware of: NVidia graphics and Intel Wireless.

You can do searches here or on Google using specific brands and model numbers.

Hello mtonkinson, welcome to LQ,

to your first question. To find a good book about Linux is really a problem. I used Unix back in the 80's, began with Linux back in 1994 with Slackware and Kernel 1.0. But then I had nothing to do with Computers at all for a long time. Since 2006 I'm back to Linux and to Slackware. I have read some books about Linux but the problem is that they are outdated when they are printed.
I always missed explanations of modern concepts such as cups, sane, udev which are/were (relatively) new in Linux. It would be much easier to understand many things when I could read a book and then try the things out.
Some weeks ago I converted the manpage of fvwm2 into postscript and now I'm reading the printed version of it.
But the point is that new concepts come very fast in Linux and long before any book is printed which covers this topic one has to be familiar with this. Nowadays the hal-daemon is such a feature in Linux.
One great advantage of the Linux/Unix world is that there are many tutorials, manpages and other documents which are very well written.
It may be helpful to chose a distribution which is well documented, such as Gentoo.

Markus

For the cmd line I can recommend
http://rute.2038bug.com/index.html.gz
http://tldp.org/LDP/Bash-Beginners-G...tml/index.html
http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/

A cornucopia of free online Linux books/manuals etc
http://www.linuxtopia.org/index.html

There is good general introduction here: http://linux.about.com/

I started off with Slackware. The Slackbook is a great reference:

http://www.slackbook.org/

When I started, I found a lot out via Google. Just be sure to add "Linux" or your distro name to the search string.

And, frankly, LQ was probably the second biggest source of help over the years.