I am not an expert too! I was kind of forced by Windows to use Linux :) I started off with Fedora Core 6. Well, any brainless guy can learn from it. I used Fedora Bible for reference since I did not have Internet a year and a half ago. Then, I switched to Debian, openSUSE, Gentoo etc. Now, I am back to Fedora! Well, when I first installed Linux along with my Windows, I overwrote the MBR several times, did not know on what to install :confused:

But now, it's been almost a year since I stopped using Windows! And yeah, LQs.org has been a great teacher till now!

Well, I'm no expert either - not even near a computer scientist - but I learned Linux by simply using it and reading much documentation and asking more experienced people.

When I got my first Linux in '93/'94, I kicked DOS entirely (because I knew how to use elm and ls and gopher on the remote Unix machine where I connected to and didn't have to plug the modem cable any longer to get out of vi or emacs... so I considered myself being capable of managing a Linux - how hard could it be...) so a friend of mine came over and we installed our stuff (not much of a choice in terms of distributions.. ;) ) and went on hours of configuring all the stuff - modelines in X and things like that.

Luckily, there has been an exceptionally well written handbook in German more or less right from the beginning, so I wasn't that lost. I started with something long forgotten on I-don't-know-how-many floppy disks and went on with Slackware, early Suses, went through a phase trying out literally everything out there, had to do my own "distribution" and a few years ago I retired on Slackware again.(No, it really hasn't changed that much, I agree.)

I had to ask much (in Usenet and IRC) of course, but over the years I managed.

Learning Linux to me meant editing Makefiles directly (no configure yet), configuring X by hand, doing downloads with things like zmodem, learning how to switch from a dial-in terminal connection to SLIP, trying to handle the first ISDN-kernels and hoping for the best with the change from a.out to ELF.

I also second the opinion that Slackware is a very good choice to learn, because it enforces more doing-by-yourself and therefore learning than most other distrbutions.

The key, neverthelss is actually _using_ it and really taking a look into documentation - I think, Linux overall is one of THE best and well documented technical subjects out there one can aim to master.

Dear David,
what you said made sense and have already been doing what you suggested but what books do you recommend especially for Mandriva and unix- perhaps a mix of detailed and simple, sorry to be a pain.


Roy.

That's not what I said, although it also is true.

What I said was that Ubuntu promotes you remaining a beginner or whatever other status you think you may be going into it, forever. It promotes not learning anything but how to point-and-click.

I have used RedHat 7, SuSE 10, Slackware {8,9,9.1,10,10.1,10.2,11.0,12.0} and the only thing that taught me the most was Linux from Scratch, not only did it force me to get my hands wet, it made me understand why things work and what could possibly go wrong when you miss with glibc...lol ^_^

My first distro was Redhat 4, I than used debian, suse and tried a lot of others, but now I'm mostly using Gentoo ;)

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http://www.nmonitoring.com

Dear Dear,
I started licking computers clean with my gran's left toe. Poor dear didn't know any difference.Is this 'slackware cred' or really what works best. I admit that I am stuggling with wine on suse 10.3. Do Microsoft put a dissabler on free to web sources if you are non-billy?

red hat enterprise 5 server newbie
 

This is my first time to use Linux after 8 years of using Windows (from Win95-Win Vista). A friend gave me a copy of Red Hat Enterprise Server 5 (correct me if i'm wrong with the OS name) a week ago and installed it on one of my computers at home (planning to setup a basic Windows-Linux network) I've been looking for forums on the net for newbies like me and I found this site. I really feel I could learn a lot from you guys!
:)

O'Reilly publish some great stuff. Matt Welsh's "Running Linux" is a classic. They also do "Fedora Linux", which revealed a few new things to me, "Suse Linux", and "Ubuntu Hacks". No Mandriva, though.

Amazon is a great place for finding books, as well as buying them. I was once headed off a book on XML by finding 13 customer reviews, all negative. Imagine your local bookshop putting up a sign "Do not buy this lousy book"!

Fred Caro: This isn't Mandriva specific, but it is very good and free: http://rute.2038bug.com/index.html.gz

I really doubt anyone will ever claim to be an expert (excluding the occasional arrogant person). I learned everything from posting 1,565 posts on here asking my dumb questions :-D (currently at 1,566 for those who read this a year from now).

The way you really learn is just doing it. Some people say GUI's hinder learning. They do in a way, it can make you forget whats under the hood ;-)