I'm a recent newbie when it comes to Linux. i've been using Fedora Core 8 for the last 6 months to manage a network monitor (Zenoss). however it seems i keep running into issues related to my sever lack of knowledge. so here is a list of questions I'd be very grateful to have answers to.

1) is there somewhere i can get a list of cli commands, what they do and what the various switches and functions are, aside from digging through a million man pages

2) it seems like every time i install fedora (I've had it crash more times than i can count) it never reacts the same way twice.

3) how do i setup $PATH. every time i try to run anything it tells me it can't find it unless i specifically reference the exact location. for instance path always seems to include /bin, but not /sbin which I think is where all the network utils are.

4) Is fedora the wrong OS for what i'm doing and my skill set?

5) On my most recent install the yum app is either not installed or screwed up, i can't install or remove anything using rpm, or yum. what do i do.

Feel free to move this wherever it may need to go, but if anyone can answer these questions I'd really appreciate it.

Thanks,
Beer

1) man bash is a single man page, and the heart of your future new knowledge. Then you'll have awk and sed, and others . perl can be very usefull and efficient too, but unfortunately it is “a million man pages”…

2) Troublesome hardware, maybe.

3) /etc/profile.d/* or /etc/profile comes to mind.

4) I don't see why Fedora would be a wrong choice, except using it for a server may not be the best decision; that said, I use Mandriva, and you'll find people saying how bad a choice it is for a server, even though I find it good (stable and so easy to configure).

5) That is definitely not normal! Maybe you should change your distribution after all…

Yves.

I'm sure you'll find something if you look at tldp or google something like 'linux bash commands', but another approach is
and when that returns too much
which will return you the names of man pages which have both 'something' and 'somethingelse' on them. Apropos is identical to 'man -k' as far as I know.
Assuming that you can count higher than zero, there is a problem here. Are you following a sensible shutdown sequence? Is there any other reason that you are reinstalling? The only time that I end up re-installing is when I want to upgrade or try out a different distro for some purpose or another.

Really, following the exact same procedure with the exact same starting hardware and no flaky hardware should always lead to the exact same result. It is, however, possible that things that you think shouldn't make any difference do in fact have subtle effects.
How do you log in? Are you logged in as a normal user or root? Do you 'su' or 'sudo' to execute commands? (Note the comments on the su man page about su -, for example, as that changes the environment, including path, that you get when you su.)

Its not my favourite distro, but in any respect concerning these questions, it is probably as good as any.

1) in addition to prev suggestions, try this: http://rute.2038bug.com/index.html.gz
2)Sounds very odd, definitely shouldn't do that. Could be bad HW eg try a RAM test (memtest?) suite or a bad driver. Are you shutting it down cleanly, not just killing the power?
3) as above answers
4)Fedora should be fine, although if you want a serious production level system I'd go with CENTOS (free ver of RHEL)
5)really odd, sounds like a bad install. If its just not installed you can add it manually.

you can always use wiki to find some basics, but you can also find there a lot of useful links, so that should be a good place to start

Linux Archive

Short answer: use it. The more you use Linux / Unix the better you'll get at it.

I've installed hundreds of Red Hat and Fedora OS and never had them crash after install. Were all these installs on the same hardware? Very strange for sure.

I appreciate the responses, and in fact have learned a lot just from reading them. I've even checked out some of the links provided, and downloaded a begging guide which I hope will help. i keep seeing things like "| grep", and wonder what's this mean as someones telling me to do it. that's the kind of stuff i need to know along with the basic architecture of the OS, where things are. lucky for me I'm a cisco guy so cli comes pretty easy. but you've got to know the commands. I believe I've got enough to put myself on the way to victory in regards. as for the odd inconsistency issue, I'm pretty sure they are identical installs but things happen. it happens with windows boxes too, but i've never had a program just not work, and not be uninstallable, and not be upgradeable. it's weird. again thanks for the assistance everyone.

Well, for while I had installs for F6 that either failed, or failed to run correctly after install, even after doing a media check on the CD/DVD.
Turned out to be a bad drive. Dropped a new DVD drive in and it installed/ran perfectly first time

The "|" or pipe-character, is used to...erm..."pipe" the output of the command on the left to the program on the right, as input.

So, when you see something like it means take the output of "ps -ef" (list running processes from all users), to "grep" searching for the pattern "bash".

grep is a wonderful tool for matching patterns in any form of input. By the example "ps -ef | grep bash" will list all Bash (Bourne-again Shell) related processes.

As a quick little trick, one thing I do, to avoid seeing my grep search at the bottom of the ps list, is to pipe the output to grep again, telling it to return any matches WITHOUT 'grep' in them:
Command piping is fun and cool, and for programs that do not support piping, use "xargs". Choice example (on Debian-based distributions), that will remove any orphaned packages (packages that do not have any reason for being there):

I guess others have already answered the specific issues. On the learning bit I have 2 suggestions.

I found it useful to go through Linux certification. I now have an LPIC-1 certification. Its not expensive, but probably helps if you have an employer willing to pay it (like I have ). In order to pass the exam you have to read and study a couple of books. So the whole process helps you focus.

Ironically distributions like Fedora make it too easy for you. Try installing Gentoo instead. The distribution and even the installation process itself forces you to read and learn more. In the end you also end up with a great Linux system.

Mons

1) Yes, 'man bash' is for you.

Im not suprised that Fedora crashed on you, it happened to me several times.

Slackware is the best distro for learning linux, as there are some configuration file editing needed. this means that YOU get to optimize your system, not the installer that cant see your needs. you will learn so much about linux with slack. IF you have the configurations all hooked up and running, then Slackware will not crash on you. Slackware "Just Works".

Some of the "For Dummies Guides" are actually fabulous books.

Honestly, I think that every computer exacts a certain price from every human that tries to tame it. That price consists of being made to stare stupidly at the screen, slack-jawed and utterly bewildered at what the hell "the machine is doing" .. or "you just did" .. or "just made that ominous 'clicking noise' right before the screen went blank."

Get used to it. It happens to everyone. Still.

As you start fiddling with Linux, some techniques will soon become "second nature," and tools like grep are definitely part of that voodoo.

Unix was put together in the 1970's on very small machines ("cast-offs," even then...) by people who couldn't type. They figured out that you could make little computers do complex things by stringing-together little, simple programs. They hit upon a general scheme where the output of one program could easily be "piped into" another program and found that you could do some serious magic using that idea, without constantly writing new programs.

So, yeah, if you want to know how many copies of the agetty process are running on your computer right now, you can do it this way: ps -A | grep agetty | wc -l, which does:

1. Get a list of all processes.
2. "Pipe" it through a filter that strips out all but the lines that contain "agetty."
3. "Pipe" that output to a word-count program, asking it to give you the number of lines.

Voodoo... Stupefy your unenlightened Windows-only friends...

...now that's a neat trick. Purely in the interests of demonstrating how this can get under your skin, I now have a script called lproc (for list processes) in my personal bin directory that goes:
where sep is a separate trivial script that prints a separator
(actually, its a few more dashes than that, but it formats better here that way and, of course, sep is useful in many scripts where, in a mass of output, you wanted to look back to see where one command finished and another started).

...and you can easily see how one trivial example has spun off into something that is already quite useful. And it goes along with the unix philosophy of having one tool that does one thing well and can be combined with other tools for a greater purpose.

How to become a better Linux user?

Be patient, be prepared to work a little harder than you might do if your were using Windows or Mac, don't be put off if things don't work the first time and don't be afraid to jump into the command line interface.

Good luck dude, you can always come here if you have trouble. :)