Hi,

My name is Kleidi Kumbaro, from Albania (not Albany). I am a developer in the windows platform and have been fiddling with windows for more than 10 years.

Yesterday, I just installed my first linux and started with centOS 5.1 with the purpose to run Asterisk.

Man, i felt so lost in the command line (on purpose I did not install the graphics). My first commands that I learned were cd ls yum mount.

Now, if someone can help me with some pointers to good resources will be like helping me learn how to walk.

Kind regards

kuklei

Hi Kuklei!

Another command you should know about:

man

This is the online manual. For example, to find out about the ls command, you would run 'man ls'. For more info on man itself, simply run 'man man'.

Also, I would recommend reading the DOS/Windows to Linux Howto.

http://tldp.org/HOWTO/DOS-Win-to-Linux-HOWTO.html

It is getting a bit old now, but given your background (and attitude!) I think you'll find it very helpful.

There are tons of Linux help websites, including a specific Linux section on Google:

http://www.google.com/linux

Also, there should be heaps of resources under /usr/doc or /usr/share/doc on your machine.

If you're interested in CLI operations (which you certainly seem to be!), there is a CLI-based file manager called Midnight Commander (mc) which can help you along. It has a built in text editor which can be very handy for quick edits to configuration files. It may not be installed on your machine by default, but a binary package for CentOS should be easy enough to find on the web.

The only other thing I can think of off the top of my head is to say that if you have any specific issues which you're having difficulties resolving, please post them here.

Oh, and welcome to LQ!

hi
welcome in the real world ;-). i have been in your shoes 10 years ago, though i feel i am still a newbie in linux until now.
you may need to install the documentation packages. you also need to read the manual pages (manpages) of a command. most of commands have its own manpage, some have infopage. commands are in /usr/bin (type: cd /usr/bin then type: ls), some in /usr/sbin (this is for root privilege (admin in term of windows). run manpage by typing: man <command>; for example run: ¨man man¨ (omit the ¨¨) or ¨man --help¨ to learn how to use the ¨man¨ command or run: man ls to know how to use ls command. run info page by typing: info <command> . it perhaps will reduce your tense when learning linux if you are using the gui version rather then the console; choose the light one like xfce if your compie has limited resources. you also can choose the ¨easier¨ linux distros like mandriva, suse or ubuntu. it should be Asterisk in those major distros, but i am not sure since i never used the program. but its really your choice. good luck.

Hi!

Thanks for the pointers rkelsen and dominikus. The man command, I forgot to mention in my first post that I learned it along with the others, and is indeed really helpful (though I cannot seem to be able to scroll...strange).

Thanks again for making your contributions to the linux community and helping novice users like me. Really appreciated.

kuklei

Hi all,

After sometime exploring linux world now I have found an excellent resource (at least from the contents at a glance). The chapters are the answers to the questions that I had in the beginning. How to install? How to dual boot? How to mount?

I am not sure if they answer correctly but, hey, check it out
GNU/Linux Desktop Survival Guide
http://www.togaware.com/linux/survivor/

Ah, its for debian

Regards and post any useful resources that you have found helpful in the past,

kuklei