Best way to learn linux

[moosey]

I have Red Hat 7.1 and am new to it. Whats the best way to learn how to use it?

 

[flippinfleck]

Get a book (O'Reilly is highly touted round these parts) on running linux, and then install. Keep it off the network (or at least segmented from the internet) till you are a little more proficient and know how to secure it.

Hands on experience will be your best friend at this point, so jump right in. Keep a steady supply of caffeine and you should be all set!

 

[Tripleshot]

I have RH 7.1 too. It came with the Linux Bible book I bought. I opened the book and saw it's going to be a steap learning curve. I just looked up on my book shelf and found Sams teach yourself linux ,and a few other Sams books,like programming and star office 5 for linux. I think I'll try one of those.

By the way, Red Hat is already up to RH 7.2. Go figure. They move faster than Bill Gates.

 

[jtshaw]

Exactly what they said, get a book and get it installed so you have something in front of you to play with. But about the networking part.... first thing you should do is edit /etc/inetd.conf (must be root) and commend out (read: put # in front of) the lines that start with ftp and telnet. Wu-FTPD and Telnetd are trouble as far as security. Most modern distro's come with ssh (or you can get ssh and the required ssl libs from www.openssh.org and www.openssl.org and install them yourself) so you can still play with it remotely.

I do recommend NOT using Redhat or Mandrake if you turely want to learn linux. Slackware or Debian are good distros to learn on if you really want to know what goes on. Don't be afraid to edit a few text files for configuration, it really isn't that hard to do.

 

[sekser]

running linux i just ordered it today... it's 30% off at amazon right now

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/156592469X

 

[hobgadling]

I found that the best way to learn linux was to jump into it with no other option. After win2k crapped on my partition table last fall I got really fed up with it and completely removed it from my drive. I downloaded the mandrake 8.0 isos (which do not prevent you from truely learining what goes on, you can still edit the text config files if you want), bout the o'reilly "running linux" book and jumped in. It was difficult at first, as Neal Stephenson says :"Unix has a learning curve like the Matterhorn". But if you keep chipping away at it, eventually you will learn how to do everything out of necessity. If you leave yourself the wiggle room of having windows installed, you'll only end up doing things that are hard to learn how to do on the windows install.

In any case, I have found that O'reilly's "running linux" and "linux in a nutshell" are very useful.

-Hob

 

[Koeppster]

I totally agree with you, hob.

I removed Windows entirely when I first installed Linux. Almost 4 years later, I have never looked back. Now, I had *nix experience under my belt (NeXTStep, IRIX, Digital Unix, a little Solaris), but not enough to help me with day-to-day tasks. With that experience, documentation, man pages, and lots of my own Internet research. I learned plenty in a very short time, and have kept adding to that knowledge continuously since.

 

[toant103]

mess around with it, break it, fix it, then you'll learn. hehehe