OK, so i think my best bet is to play around with CentOS in order to best prepare me to administer RHEL, only through the CLI.

Feel free to tell me I'm wrong, wouldn't be the first time on here, haha.

And thanks for the little tip as to why it's called Fedora, I never noticed that before.

FWIW I used CentOS to get my RHCE...

The first time I even SAW RHEL was during the test

...goes to show you that CentOS _can_ be used as a "drop in" replacement for RHEL when support isn't needed

-C

that's awesome, and good to know!

well, I was just able to install CentOS 5.3, and even better was able to log in. not that I know what to do now, better start reading!!

Thanks to everyone involved in the longest forum post i've ever been involved with, couldn't have gotten this far without everyone.

Now if I could just figure out what the ~ directory is haha.

thanks everybody!!

~ is the home directory of whoever is logged in

and you're welcome

-C

you guys & gals are too good to me!! I owe each one of you a cyber beer LOL.

my ~ has a couple log and cfg files in it, but when i go to home, i dont see any of that stuff. I definitely need to start reading! but at least I can do a ls to view stuff in the directories!!

When you say you go to your "home", I'll assume you mean from the graphical desktop. And, if you are using CentOS 5.3, that's most likely Gnome Desktop. Anyway, the file browser will filter out a lot of those "hidden" files for you. If this is the case you are talking about. In the "view" menu option, there's a check box for "show hidden files". That will show you everything. Also, just for future reference, any file whose name starts with a "." is a "hidden" file and won't show up in an ls unless you use the "-a" option.

I didn't install any GUI, although I used the GUI to install to save me a headache. What I was talking about was when I do a ls in ~ and in the actual /home directory, I see different stuff.

I'm pretty sure I wasn't clear before, as I'm just learning here. but thanks for the files starting with . tip too.

Oh. /home directory is the container for all the home directories. No one user owns that. ~ for you would be "/home/rjo98" (or whatever). cd to ~ and do a pwd. That will give you the full path to "your" home directory.

Also, I see now that you didn't install the GUI, and I had read that before. But, for some reason that didn't register in my brain. sorry.

No worries, it took all my strength not to install the GUI haha.

Thanks for the pwd, that showed me the full path, and showed me that root's "home" directory is really just the /root folder, haha.

embarrassed, but happy I learned something!

I hope you aren't doing much while logged in as root. I generally stay logged in with a non-root account and use su and sudo to run whatever commands I need to as root. Running as root can be dangerous. I learned that the first time I did an rm -rf in the wrong place (and, I did have backups, so it wasn't a total disaster). Once you get a little more time going, I suggest creating a normal user account and setting up that user as able to run su and/or sudo, if you haven't already. A normal user can't trash what isn't theirs. Root can trash everything.

(helpful hint #2)

yeah, as soon as i figure out how to create another account, I planned on doing that so I don't fubar something logged in as root. Right now i'm just trying to figure out how to power this box down without holding the power button down LOL.

Since I have a CentOS 5.3 handy...
Will set up a basic account. You can explore the system using that (mostly) and use root when you have to. Then, set up the su and sudo stuff when you have time.

Do:
for more options.

There's some tricks to use with the halt and shutdown users that you will discover along the way. For now, you can log in as root and do "shutdown -h now".

BTW, if you know all this stuff, just tell me to shut up.

Meh, it's not as if a GUI gets in your way if you want to learn CLI stuff. Just type Ctrl + alt + F1-6 and your GUI turns into a console; press Alt + F7 and the GUI is back.

nuwen, believe me, I know nothing, so any help is appreciated.

as far as for the GUI stuff, its not installed on any of the servers (at least from what i'm told) that i need to learn to support, so that's why its not installed on my CentOS test system. some other people made points as to why to keep it the same in previous posts.

/sbin/poweroff or /sbin/reboot (as root) will do it

There are web-based tools (like Webmin if that's on RHEL) for Admin that you could start from your laptop browser, if there's a web server running on your RHEL machine - GUI without the GUI so to speak!

One quick tip - "/var/log" is where all the log files are, and having a scan through them can give you a good idea if something goes awry. If you do

tail -f <logfile name> # probably /var/log/something(anything after hash is a comment in bash scripts

then the last 10 lines or so will be displayed, & updated live so you can see what's logged when you(or another user) do something.

Linux directory structure (don't take all this as gospel, I might be mistaken about details)
- system binaries are in "/sbin" & "/usr/sbin"(not on normal users path, just root),
system-wide apps are in "/bin" & "/usr/bin" ,
user installed apps are supposed to go in "/usr/local/bin",
& I think self-contained apps(like a member of Program Files in MS)are meant to go in "/opt",
config stuff is in "/etc" (you'll be looking at files here a lot)
"/home" you've already mentioned,
"/tmp" is obvious,
Docs are in "/usr/share/docs/<app name>",
"/boot" is where the boot loader lives and the (surprise)boot scripts are
"/dev/" devices - every device in GNU/Linux is represented by a directory
"/proc" is interesting - all the subdirectories are actually memory locations that contain device info like all the PCI & USB stuff- can be helpful in troubleshooting,
"/mnt" is where you 'mount' external disks/DVD drives - or was, USB meaning external drives are auto-mounted now, without any need for drivers etc.
Good Luck with things