Hiya,

I'm a proud and accomplished Cisco network engineer very comfortable with CLI, but I shamefully suck at Linux. I have tried for years to learn it by building a box at home and spending hours on the simplest things, like getting Apache to work and installing Bugzilla. After I get done the one thing I needed to do, I ditch the whole thing until the next time I need to do something in Linux.

This time I have a CentOS 4.4 box up and running and spent hours trying to setup X and am hitting a brick wall. I will post my woes to software - servers and hopefully there is someone not on vacation to help me

I can't give up this time because there are more tasks I need to do in Linux after this one. Merry XMas to all.

Welcome and Merry Christmas to you, too!

@mikey

Merry Christmas to you!

If you're really committed to learn Linux I would recommend that you get Slackware, install it and play with it for a few months.
The installation manuals are superb, and the distro behaves the 'way of Unix'. Once you get a grip of Slack you can get into anything.

I was a Slacker for about 5 years (now I use ArchLinux) and till this day I believe is the best distro to learn.

R.

G-day Mickey, Merry Christmas from Australia.

Cisco engineer? check out the Linux Documentation Project, and the Linux Standards Base, like all *nix's, you will recognise a lot as familiar.
Samba is the ducks guts (as we say in Aussie) with disparate networks,
native ip table security at kernel level in the OS, a virtual schmorgasbordt of OS shells to chose from, to accomplish almost any admin task with a hand-crafted shell script.
Stable, flexible, just give it a real test-drive, granted, the rest of the world probably still needs to cling to Bill's OS ( drivers licence is AUTO ONLY as well probably.) But not you and I, or the other folk here.
Try out a few different installs, we all have, on your spare box, and you will find one that feels like that old pair of Levi's.

regards shorty943.

registered Linux user 437639.