Which Distro for a newbie?

Wow, you did a computer science degree and didnt touch linux, im very suprised! I would have thought it would have had a fair amount of linux!
 
Thanks for all your advice.

I went for Fedora 11 in the end. I got it up and running after a few minor problems. I've so far spent my whole day trying to get codecs to play my mp3's! I got there in the end though!

I'm very clueless as to the whole terminal way of working (I'm trying to avoid the GUI so I learn a bit more), I have to google literally every single step whenever I try to do something!

Is there a decent beginners guide to Fedora and Linux? I'm mainly after help with the terminal commands but I think I need a bit of a background on how the whole system is setup; all this mounting drives, accessing root accounts, exploring the filesystem malarky!

Thanks again.
 
As already suggested, the Arch documentation is very good. Similarly, the Gentoo documentation is formidable, even if the distro itself is pretty full-on.

Also, have a look here... http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18037513

Below, in no particular order, are some Linux links from my StumbleUpon account which I've picked up over the years and which may hopefully prove useful for you:

http://www.tuxradar.com/content/take-linux-filesystem-tour
http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/new-cool-list-linux.html
http://networking.ringofsaturn.com/Unix/UnixQuickReference.php
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/views/linux/library.jsp
http://www.collegeathome.com/blog/2008/05/22/open-courseware-for-linux-geeks-50-resources/
http://fullcirclemagazine.org/ (only really useful if you're using Ubuntu or one of it's siblings)
http://cs.clark.edu/~clug/commands.htm
http://www.linuxalt.com/
http://freeengineer.org/learnUNIXin10minutes.html
http://degreedirectory.org/articles/Linux_OpenCourseWare_Educational_Site_Rankings.html
http://www.zinkwazi.com/unix/notes/tricks.vim.html (I love vi!)
http://linuxconfig.org/
http://www.granneman.com/techinfo/linux/
http://www.mylinuxway.com/linux-folder-system/
http://www.computerhope.com/unix/overview.htm
http://loll.sourceforge.net/linux/links/
http://www.linux-tutorial.info/
http://www.howtogeek.com/tag/linux/


Hopefully at least some of those will be of some use to you :)
 
Stoned_SpaZZZ said:
Wow, you did a computer science degree and didnt touch linux, im very suprised! I would have thought it would have had a fair amount of linux!
Click to expand...

I did a Computer Science Degree (joint honours with Mathematics) and unless things have changed, only ONE computing lab a the University of Aberdeen actually run Linux.

No courses actually required you to use them either that I can remember. A few of the Java programming courses you could use them but didn't have to.

One computing lab was Solaris which was used for a C programming course.

Every other computing lab was running Windows


To answer the OPs question I would start with OpenSuse. Was a nice place for me to start (well I started with Suse Linux Pro (cost like £50 at the time for the discs and big manual))
 
*Look at the jobs in your area that mention 'linux' skills and then start with the distro that seems to pop up the most. Learn the file system hierarchy ,user administration, installing and configuring a web, mail, DNS server.

I use Gentoo personally, but I would recommend good old Debian as a learning environment.


* I see you had that idea anyway - Good luck whatever distro you choose.
 
Last edited:
Smit said:
I did a Computer Science Degree (joint honours with Mathematics) and unless things have changed, only ONE computing lab a the University of Aberdeen actually run Linux.
Click to expand...

No Unix? I did an HND at Aberdeen College and even there covered some basic Unix administration.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom