whats first to learn?
 

Hi
As part of my career in the Embedded systems i wish to learn Linux which was mostly recommended.The tutorials that i had taken from my training institute was not satisfactory i was unable to get the concepts.Can any one suggest me how and where i need to start up from.Thanks in advance

Member Response
 

Hi,

Welcome to LQ!
I am a firm believer in 'Hands-On' to gain experience and supporting the tasks at hand. In your first session with a training institute was the course a active lab experience where you take the theoretical and then do the technical/practical session. How much experimentation?

You could use a cheap arm system along side of a Laptop/Desktop with Gnu/Linux along with that arms' tool chain. That way you will be using a bench setup to debug, work or compile necessary changes while experimenting. You could use a Virtual Machine (VM) for your arm work. VirtualBox is a good choice;You will learn more intrinsic parts of Linux on both the supporting machine & arm. You will benefit using the command line(cli) instead of a GUI based session. Not to say you cannot use a GUI to enhance the tasks but knowing how to perform tasks at the cli level will benefit across more systems.

Just a few links to aid you to gaining some understanding;



1 Linux Documentation Project

2 Rute Tutorial & Exposition

3 Linux Command Guide 

4 Bash Beginners Guide

5 Bash Reference Manual

6 Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide

7 Linux Newbie Admin Guide

8 LinuxSelfHelp

9 Utimate Linux Newbie Guide
10 Linux Home Networking
11 Virtualization- Top 10

The above links and others can be found at 'Slackware-Links'. More than just Slackware® links!

... and if you want instead to buy a virtual-machine host (e.g. VMWare), so that you are not distracted by setting up VirtualBox, you can do that also.

You definitely need to get your hands dirty with the tools, in a hands-on situation where Linux itself is "a means to an end" ... a means of getting to the true system-of-interest which is the embedded system. VMs are a very good way to set up arbitrary environments without disturbing the host system. You're probably going to find many different Linux distros in use, but once you get a few of them under your belt (by using them as a means to an end), the pragmatic differences between them start to fade until "you can pretty much get into any car, and drive."

(As my parents said when I was learning to drive, "well, your first car probably shouldn't be a Porsche ("damn!" ;) ) but mostly what you need is a really big, empty parking-lot to drive around in.")