Hello fellow members-

I'm back again and i just wanted some good advice from anyone willing to give it.

I just installed MANDRIVA-LINUX on my box- (it took me 3 days to get it right btw) Sometimes I'm just to stuborn to ask for help. My first time for this OS and I'm very excited. I've never tried linux before, being that windows was my first choice of OS. I must admit I'm a very formidable windows user,
but at this point I'm bored with it, so here i am.


Querey:

I know i need to get familiar with the OS, but after that what things should i start off with to get me efficient, and a little advanced quickly?

[I would also like to get excellent with the command line/ shells / Bash- you know things like that.]

Point me in the right direction and I'll do the rest.
Self research is my specialty.

All opinions are welcome!!

I'm ready to get my hands dirty.

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>>BLACKHOLE<< + No knowledge or information shall escape my dense gravitational pull +

I'll put in my

First off, if you really want to get your hands dirty, wipe out Mandriva and try one of the big three: Slackware, Gentoo, or Debian. Slackware configuration is done completely by editing config files, no gui help at all. Gentoo, I don't know too much, but I think it's source based also, so you'll need to be using the command line a lot as well. Debian, IMHO, is a bit of a midpoint with some good commandline and/or ncurses based tools to help you along the way, but not really gui based like Mandriva and other newbie centric distros. You still have to get your hands dirty in config files. Just my opinion...

All newbies should read some of the documents on the Linux Documentation Project. Google for "newbie command line", get familiar with the linux directory structure. Google and TLDP are good places for this.

Other than that, the way I really learned is to give yourself a project. For example, decide to setup an FTP server on your machine. Then start fiddling with how to do it. Or if you have an Nvidia card and want to get the 3D acceleration going, figure that out. Take it one step at a time and you'll get pretty proficient quickly. As for becoming a guru, I've been using linux a couple years and am still nowhere near that level. I lean a lot on goolge and the forums here. Don't be afraid to ask questions, but if you're as good at self research as you say, google will carry you a long way.

Hope this helps!

It depends on just how new you are, but the info at http://rute.2038bug.com/index.html.gz is very good. There's also the Linux Documentation Project at http://www.tldp.org/ and I'm betting you can expect heaps of others from the folks here...

I thought of one other way to learn that I do a lot. That's look at the other threads here, especially the zero reply threads and see if you can help someone solve their problem. Sometimes I don't know anything about the problem, but I install stuff and try to help configure. Mostly I just use man pages and google to find relevent links and then try out the fixes. When one works, I post it in response to their problem and it helps them out.

Good suggestions-

Guess I'll redo my HD and try installing slackware on my box-
I know this is going to be a challenge, but i think im up for it.

Tell me pljvaldez- were you able to install your first linux distro from scratch by yourself???

Looks like its gonna be a loonnnng year for me guys!

______________
>>BLACKHOLE<<

Thanks for the suggestions and the links...

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http://steve-parker.org/sh/sh.shtml <-- you can learn about bourne/bash from the guy who made the original unix shell (bourne). unless I'm sorely mistaken, anything you learn about bourne will apply to bash (and some other shells too). I'll be reading that page quite a bit myself in the near future.

My first distro was Red Hat 8, which installed well (other than my internal sound/modem combo card), but I didn't really like it.

Eventually I tried Debian, and there was a really good install guide for Woody, so I followed that. I liked Debian so much that I have't really spent much time installing or using anything else. I rebuilt my kernel, dist-upgraded to Sarge, and have been loving Debian ever since. I just installed it on my work laptop and it's loads better than XP (which hogs RAM due to anti-everything programs required by work).

Every now and then I install another distro (Ubuntu, slackware, suse) onto my spare drive at home, but honestly I rarely find myself using them or trying to get them working like my Debian install does. Debian just fit me so nicely, I'm just not dying to try much else right now. I really like installing the base debian system and then installing only what I want. It's worked out nicely. And like I said, it has some helpful package management stuff that really works well together. I make several different machines all have the same program set by using dpkg --get-selections and dpkg --set-selections.

Another good guide to help you learn Command Line Interface for Linux.