How did you learn Linux?

Originally Posted by rnturn I found that WinXP did a good enough job of trashing itself without the need for Service Pack installations. It did that one time too many for me and I stopped using it---too many headaches.

Amen to that!

My reason for posting this was because I feel like I'm not prepared to be a Linux sysadmin even though I really like open-source.

I've heard people say not to do what you like for a living 'cause you'll learn to hate it.

Yet, I still feel like this is probably the only thing that will give me a leg-up when it comes to the competition that is the labor force.

I don't know LVM by heart, I can't recite to you the entirety of SELinux man pages much less any man page, I'm still not 100% sure on the arguments I'm to give when using dd to create swap, etc.

I wanted to know if there's such a being here who managed to reach Linux-enlightment such that in a short amount of time was somehow able to become a Linux guru of the 1st order.

'Cause right now, that's what's holding me back from trying a Linux position. I can understand some basics, but I've never had to manage a Linux environment before.

Based on the responses I've seen so far, I feel like I can actually just give it a go now since it doesn't look like I need to be a Linux specialist/SME in just about every open-source project.

I feel like I know the defacto packages and tools used for certain jobs/tasks but again, I'm not a know-it-all. I will see what I can get.

Thanks!

Originally Posted by That Random Guy I've heard people say not to do what you like for a living 'cause you'll learn to hate it.

True enough, but the opposite isn't much better: waiting to get home from your job so you can do what you really like doing. Splitting your (creative) energy between job and hobby.
It's a conundrum, a catch 22 sort of situation.

Originally Posted by That Random Guy I've heard people say not to do what you like for a living 'cause you'll learn to hate it.

There are also many who say "Take a job at what you love and you'll never work a day in your life". It seems to me the difference between the two is in autonomy. If you are under the thumb of either some arrogant despot of a boss or must cave in to customer demands you might grow to hate it but if you have the power to make important choices and explain to your clients why it is in their interests to listen to an expert, you, that is a joy.

I have many interests and for several years I owned and ran an antique furniture and art restoration shop because I love working in woods and finishes. To head off unreasonable demands I made a sign which read

Originally Posted by MySign Low Prices! Fast Delivery !! High Quality !!! ..... Pick Two.

Originally Posted by That Random Guy I wanted to know if there's such a being here who managed to reach Linux-enlightment such that in a short amount of time was somehow able to become a Linux guru of the 1st order. 'Cause right now, that's what's holding me back from trying a Linux position. I can understand some basics, but I've never had to manage a Linux environment before.

I am by no means a "Linux guru" let alone "of the 1st order" but I did design, install and maintain several small business networking systems (largest one being around 200 workstations) based first in OS/2 and later in Linux and I never once had an unscheduled reboot or compromise beyond a single workstation screwed up by an ignorant employee. The servers worked perfectly and were easy to maintain and my clients were very pleased giving me complete autonomy once I demonstrated our interests were the same, an efficient work environment.

The point is you don't have to know it all, just the parts that apply to the job and enough more to be able to grow.

Originally Posted by That Random Guy Based on the responses I've seen so far, I feel like I can actually just give it a go now since it doesn't look like I need to be a Linux specialist/SME in just about every open-source project. I feel like I know the defacto packages and tools used for certain jobs/tasks but again, I'm not a know-it-all. I will see what I can get. Thanks!

Whatever you decide I wish you the best of fortune but all signs appear to support a background in Linux is only becoming more valuable as the years pass. If you enjoy it that's frosting on the cake and your clients or employers will see this in your demeanor and that is very attractive.

Lot's of reading and using it as my main OS. Linux is the best OS in the world...

If you want to learn fast go for a "hard" and well-documented Doing things yourself is the best way to learn the Arch wiki is spectacular and a great learning resource. But of course Arch isn't the best and good source to learn

I learned by doing and experimentation. My first forays into open source were inside of Virtualbox. That one piece of software is the majority of my self education. Everything I now have running bare metal, was probably done in Virtualbox first. I had something I wanted to accomplish, I googled. In some cases what I found didn't work and I had to piece together a few different guides to get it right. After awhile I ended up with a modest server / client layout in my home that I'm fairly proud of. But admittedly now that I have accomplished my goal of centralizing media storage + a few other services (print and the like) I haven't got much more reason to keep learning it, other than keeping up with whatever changes as stuff gets newer. LTSP 6 will be a bit different so I'll have to mess with that. Until then though, just regular maintenance.

Mike McGrath, Slackbook, Rute, and a Jaunty Jackalope along with Trial and Error; this and other forums; and Time

From Unix V7.
Ed

Reading about your dual boot adventures, I did remember some of my own older dual boot adventures too!

It was in a company where I worked then, early 90s (1990-1993). Each one had a personal computer, 386 for the engineers, 286 for the secretary and accounting posts, 486 later. A colleague (older than me) had previous experience on Unix, he owned a Unix installation media series (at least 70 floppy disks) for Interactive Unix (a Unix for IBM compatibles) and had in mind to install it on its 386 computer. I was very interested on this because I had no previous experience on Unix at all. The pc's hard drive capacity was 200 MB and we had to install 2 OSs on it, msdos+windows 3.1 and Unix. We started by partitioning the drive in two partitions from the msdos installation floppy disks. You know, fdisk and so. Next, we installed msdos+windows in the first partition and verified that it works. After that, we started installing Unix in the second partition. As I did know nothing about, I was just watching and trying to understand what my friend was about to do. The longest part of the installation was of course to put all these 70 floppies, one by one. After 1.5 to 2 hours we had to reboot in order to have the system working and proceed to further configuration steps. Unfortunately, it didn't happen We had to everything delete and restart from fdisk. Same problem. We did repeat this all next day without success. My friend finally found what caused the failure: we had to partition the hard drive using fdisk from Unix, not from msdos! After that Unix worked: 70-something MB for the operating system and 30 MB for our work files!!

Another famous dual boot I remember from that same company was a year later, on a 486 machine this time, specially boosted with a 512 MB hard drive. In fact the hard drive was 640 MB big but for some reason I didn't know only 512 of them were accessible. Now, I suspect that it was related to the BIOS. This time it was not an initiative of some employees but an official purchase from the company, in order to install and run a calculation software that was developed and running under Unix (precisely SCO Unix). This time, the installation work had to be done by personnel of the company selling and supporting the SCO Unix OS. So, Monday morning we were early at the office, waiting Ms A... (I still remember her name, 3 decades later!! ) with the box of the software. She was a girl younger than most of us, not very experienced, almost an apprentice! She had to call her company several times to learn what to do next. This time she had to change 50 floppy disks only, and this because they were 1.4 MB instead of 1.2 MB for Interactive Unix. Of course, the installation failed and she had to restart from fdisk next day. To be sincere, I was interested in the girl rather than in SCO Unix I met her a few years later. She was then much more experienced than the first time.

For the history, that software is still on the market, now under mswindows and under Linux. Comments from users show that it is faster under Linux. This is important, taking into account that jobs can take several hours, even 20-24 hours and more for big models. My company runs the mswindows 10 version, on a fast xeon workstation equipped with a very expensive graphics card, because they were told that the software makes use of the graphics card. However, I checked myself the graphics card activity and found it near zero!

Snake oil I guess.

It would have been "Slack oil" for me.

i read a bash guide : https://www.tldp.org/LDP/Bash-Beginn...ers-Guide.html
learned to make my own modules for backtrack distro.
made simple web pages and learned to use html / css / JavaScript.
my html server were Hibachi.
searched for cheatsheets for bash / awk / perl / grep and read em.

installed debian and numerous other distros and read man pages.
made transparent OpenBSD bridge firewall.
read a lot of how-to's about networking.

made Local Area Network for my mom and dad when i lived with them.

EDIT: compiled programs from source even if i could have used repos.