Hi
I have finally took the plunge and entered the wonderful world of Linux.
I am TOTALLY new to Linux, however, I am experienced in other OS's (MS & Novell)

I am looking for a site (maybe this one) to get me 'started' in the basics to allow me to further my knowledge in Linux.

I have recently downloaded and install RH v9.0 and so far so good, trouble is, now it is installed I am limited in what I can do for example:

I have downloaded kopete chat client so I can use the MSN messenger network, I have the .gz file but do not have a clue what to do with it, where is the executable installer

I am also looking for a freeware/shareware mailserver simillar to MS Exchange or WorkGroupMail but do not know of any good linux free/shareware sites, can anyone recommend a site or a mailserver product?

Any other pointers, good sites to just browse and pick up the basics (very basics) to get me up and running,

Thanks

http://www.slackware.com/book (ignore the url, it's mainly generic apart from package management) is a good basic guide to stuff.

http://www.tldp.org/LDP/intro-linux/html/intro_02.html
also good

Just a tip, Gaim is much better than Kopete And to extract a .tar.gz file, something like this does it well

tar -xvzf is far simpler

isn't RH9 pretty old? that was the first linux i installed almost a year and a half ago. if it were me, i would start over with a recent fedora.

i think with RH/fedora, etc. the usual method of installing software is using RPMs. i guess you could compile it yourself, though. but then you might as well just use slackware. gl

Cool! Learn something new everyday

excellent online book:

http://www.icon.co.za/~psheer/book/index.html.gz

Eh? Don't forget I am a newbie.... what do the parameters do?

if you don't know what certain options do, you can do <command> --help (or sometimes -h) to get a listing. for more in-depth info, you can read the man pages:

$ man tar

Download and install fedora 3 over your RH as RH is no longer supported and Fedora as all the good updates including newer kernels.

I would do this before you start changing config files.

Some newbie stuff
Do you know how to use an editor?
If not open up a termainl and type (vi) then file name. To edit a file hit (i), when finished type (:wq) and that closes and saves the file.

Here are the locations of the config files that you will edit

/etc/samba/smb.conf
/etc/grub.conf
/etc/httpd/httpd.conf (storage dir for web page is /var/www/)
/etc/squid/squid.conf
/etc/inittab <---changing run levels

This will get most of your networked services fixed and running.

Also to start a service like samba from the command line its

service smb start or stop or restart <------file sharing with windows clients
service httpd start <----apache webserver
service squid stop <-----------cache web server


To install an RPM
rpm -iv nameofpackage.rpm

Anyone know of a decent freeware/shareware email server for Linux?

sendmail,postix

On your install cd's

the free software foundation

http://www.fsf.org


ibiblio

http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/

Hi, thanks for this info. After lots of searching I was unable to find any reference to sendmail and postix in the gnome menus. I checked the installed apps and they are both installed.

I have been dreading replying to this, but, here goes... do these applications run in the GUI or are they only command line driven? (spot the windows user, hoping to be an ex-windows user though)

text config:
http://www.postfix.org/documentation.html