Slackware is generally considered the most BSD-like, so you might want to start there. Slackware will also give you a very good working knowledge of the vanilla Linux kernel and support software, rather than having you learn a distribution-specific set of tools or modifications.

1 members found this post helpful.

Thanks MS3FGX, I will try Slackware out!

Also look at Debian. Many other distro's (not debian based) are more System V oriented.

Red Hat and SuSE may be more likely commercial distro's in enterprises is you are aiming to gain skills which may be applicable to your work in the future.

Actually that is my MO -- I am exiting the IT world for a bit and going to try Surgical Technology, but I want to retain the unix skills in case I have to return to IT.

Forgive my ignorance, but from what I understood System V was real close to what I worked with, not BSD.... am I missing something?

Thx!!

...almost any Linux distro will allow you to use your command line skills in an emulated terminal (which, these days, I prefer to using a completely non-GUI system, but YMMV): there are differences in things like the exact arrangements for start up, and the commands for controlling networking, but this tends to be minor stuff
...until you trip over it.

If you mean the most similar to Solaris, maybe the non-Linux answer to that would be OpenSolaris? Solaris tends to do a few things its own way, and if you are very used to the Solaris way of doing things, anything else is going to be a minor culture shock for a short while, but I can't see that whatever you choose would give you a big problem.

If you want a book that covers sys admin on the different platforms, and the differences between them, 'Essential System Admin' by Frisch is good (if thick and other-than-cheap); if that is of interest have a look at a copy before committing to buying.

Any linux distro has command line for the legacy unix programmer's workbench parts like sed, awk, grep, find, tar, ...

From X11, you may type ctrl+alt+F1 ... F4 and activate a "console."

From within X11, there are various "terminal" "xterm" and "konsole" applications that present the command line as well. When I'm writing code,
I like to open multiple "konsoles" and then use X11 to minimize, restore, stack and shuffle the several views into what I'm doing. (blush) I've even
had several X11 terminals running with the 'screen' utility so that even the terminal is doing multiple things...

Yep, I'm a geek,
~~~ );-D

PS/ No I don't write device drivers using 'cat >filename' [grin]