Ok, so I've decided to pick up unix. Having worked in security for years and only on windows, I decided it was time to pull my finger out. I am starting with a UBUNTU ISO playing through VMWare player on my windows 7 machine. I should imagine this has been asked so many times - but I wanted to unlock the other account functions so here goes anyway:

.....imagine you had just come out of a coma and wanted to learn unix in order to understand the likes of Red Hat etc because you work with various banks and security organisations and really need to fill the knowledge gap - where would you start - in which direction would you point such an individual?

Br,

Damian

I'd point you at the copy of Ubuntu you just installed and tell you to start using it to do things you would normally do on Windows. When you get stuck, Google. If you're still stuck, ask somewhere, such as here.

If there's a specific topic you want to know about, Google. If you're still stuck, ask somewhere, such as here.

If you want to learn Unix then install Unix, not Linux. Choose one of the BSD Unix systems. If you want to learn Red Hat Linux then install Red Hat Linux. (Centos may be a suitable substitute for Red Hat.) The Linux distributions are idiomatic enough that you should start with the one that you believe is the most relevant to your plans.

I just noticed you give your location as Bournmouth. Assuming that's Bournmouth as in the place on the south cost of England and you have money you can spend no training, you could look at GBDirect. I did a five day Linux foundation course with them about ten years ago. It was quite good as I recall. No idea what it was like from a value for money point of view though, someone else paid the bill. Other training courses and companies are available

Good points. The two big Enterprise distros are SUSE Linux Enterprise and RedHat Enterprise Linux. Both can be downloaded for free but require purchase of a license in order to keep them up to date. Buying a license also gets you support from the vendor.

There are free (as in cost) distros that are related to both of them though, those being openSUSE and Fedora respectively. SUSE Linux Enterprise releases are essentially an openSUSE release that's polished a bit, has different branded and is supported by Novell for years instead of ~18 months. (SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 is supported until 2019 IIRC what I saw on the screen the other day when I was poking around in our Novell licensing at work. Assuming Novell survive that long of course ) I think the same is essentially true of the relationship between Fedora and RedHat.

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To refine a point made by arizonagroovejet, when you use google, use www.google.com/linux for Linux/Unix related questions. Google filters out much (one might even say most) non-related hits. There are similar google filters for microsoft and macos.

In re RedHat Enterprise, the current free version is CentOS, which I believe doesn't include some proprietary applications. Otherwise, it's RedHat Enterprise.

There isn't a huge difference between linux and unix. If you know how to do a task in one then you have a good chance to do it in the other.

There are many Unix systems in operation. Solaris and AIX and HP-Unix and older Dec and irix stuff are all out there working.

I agree with the others that a more commercial base would be a better start.


OpenIndiana provides a good start at the Solaris world.

Any of the BSD's are good choices.

For Linux, I think Centos or Scientific or OpenSuse would be good starting points.

Every version has different ways to do the same task so you have to understand the task more than understand the process to get it to work would be my opinion.

Here are some useful references:

http://linux.about.com/. It's oriented to Ubuntu, but it's full of good info.

http://tille.garrels.be/training/tldp/. Machtelt Garrels Intro to Linux.

http://www.slackbook.org/. Slackware oriented, but excellent on the basics, such as file structure, permissions, and the like.