hi

presently i'm working on CentOS as junior Admin. because i know CentOS, i can also deal with RHEL and Fedora distributions. Till now, i haven't worked on other distros. I'm just curious, if i learn Debian and openSUSE also, do i cover most of the linux distros that are present now?

When i say learn, i'm not talking about desktop/X, bash, scripting or any other general/common tasks. I'm specific about server roles. ie., network management, application management, http, ftp, samba or any other server roles (with no GUI).

Cause i recently wanted to give some static IP address for my friend's Ubuntu linux laptop, but couldn't figure-it-out what is 'ifcfg-eth0' equivalent for Ubuntu and also 'service network restart' equivalent of it. I have to google to figure that.

So CentOS, Debian and openSUSE cover most distros?

Thanks

Hi,

Debian is amazing ....

the best debian resource
debian.org





cheers...

I would say throw Slackware into the mix, as it eschews distro-specific GUI configuration tools, favoring the CLI and editing text files instead. It will prepare you to use ANY distro. As they say, learn Slackware and you learn Linux.

If you learn OpenSUSE, that will cover enterprise SUSE. Ubuntu do have corporate clients (e.g. Google), so learning that (particularly their server version) might be useful.

But by and large, the deeper you dig the more alike they are. One obvious difference is the start-up: systemd in SUSE and CentOS, upstart in Ubuntu, init in Debian. As for Slackware, "learn Slackware and you learn Linux as it was 15 years ago".

can Slackware be used as server?

Most definitely. Many do.

If it ain't broken, don't fix it. I've learned more in my time as a Slackware user than I ever did using anything else, and I have a thoroughly modern desktop that does everything I expect it to.

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hmmm... Slackware seems pretty interesting. started downloading... 2.2 GB is very small compared to other distros.

As long as you are willing to learn, I think you will be satisfied.

IMHO you can divide them in categories based on package managing:

0. Slackware: Old-school, not based around a package manager (kiss and do-whatever-you-like)
1. Debian: DPKG/APT, easy to use, no vendor restrictions
2. Red Hat + SUSE: RPM, easy to use, main distro is very commercial (including commercial/payed support)
3. Gentoo + Arch + ...: source based package manager

Everything else is usually based on one from the above.

The two major families of distributions are Red Hat and Debian.

Centos is a good choice in the Red Hat family. Ubuntu is usually the clear choice in the Debian family. SUSE is close enough to Red Hat that you don't really need to learn it separately.

I'm not really convinced by the common claim that Slackware helps you learn more about Linux than other distributions. In any case, if I understand your main goal, Slackware is a side track for you.

You want to learn how to do admin tasks for Linux distributions that businesses and/or other people use, right? Someone who chose Slackware is not likely to hire outside help.

Pay attention to the fundamental difference between the way mixed architecture x86_64 with x86 is set up in Red Hat vs. the way it is set up in Debian. (I don't know if there is any third way to do that. Any third way would make a lot less sense than either of those two ways).

Pay attention to the fundamental difference between the way package management is set up in Red Hat vs. Debian. Obviously there is a third way and fourth and fifth ... But between them Red Hat and Debian dominate that topic. If you know those two and no others, you are in pretty good shape for Linux admin tasks. BTW, Ubuntu's online resources for searching packages are a great help when doing admin on any Debian based distribution. The packages there might not fit another Debian based distribution. But the information from the search almost always fits.

As for the specific networking question you asked, you are outside my expertise. I didn't think that stuff was significantly different between Red Hat and Debian. But I could be wrong.

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Gentoo has a source-based package manager, however, Arch (pacman) is binary based.

Heh, I knew someone would mention that (just didn't want to add extra complexity).

Arch still provides a ports-like system for building packages ... and Gentoo offers binaries as well (but yeah, it's not entirely the same).

I find Debian's own package search to be very useful too, so much so I added it to my Firefox search engines:
http://www.debian.org/distrib/packages

I always found Suse to be quite... unusual when it comes to administration tasks. They implement many things their own way.

Slackware and Arch are pretty "vanilla" and therefor represent the original GNU/Linux standards better than other distros.

Debian and it's derivatives (including *buntu, Mint and so on) are extremely widely used both on servers as well as desktops, so knowing how to deal with those systems is certainly not a bad idea.

Gentoo is relatively "vanilla" also, but the portage system requires some learning before you really "master" that system, although it pays off big time because it gives you a level of control over your system like no other distro does, yet still offering relatively easy package management, again, once you got the knack of it.