Trying to break into the Linux world - advice?

The stuff you can find here is not always up to date but I've found it a veritable gold-mine for Linux resources over the years: http://tldp.org/

If you're looking for help somewhere (the community over at the Ubuntu Forums was always very helpful and kind while I was active there), and someone gives you a command to run, ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS read up on the command's man page and make sure you understand what you're doing.

Not only does this help you to learn better, it can also prevent you from being the victim of malicious mischief. Not that you're necessarily going to be made a fool of whenever you ask for help, but there are some majorly immature people who hang out on Linux help boards who like to feed new users commands that destroy their systems. They're not as big a problem as they used to be, but they're still there every once in a while.

Be especially wary of the rm (remove) command.

If you have a Macintosh lying around, play around with the Terminal application some. It might be useful helping you get to grips with working a Unix-like terminal (one reason I love OS X is that it's actually a UNIX operating system- it's just a sheen of Apple gloss over the internals. If you open up the Terminal and start cd'ing around the filesystem you'll find that it's actually laid-out somewhat similarly to a Linux system)

 

i dont have any site or anything to show, you but do know that its a tad different from mac/pc, so be prepared for some difficulty


if your looking for a version to start out with then i would recomend Ubuntu

i got it on this computer im typing on but on another partition, so i can dualboot, and even launch them at the same time with a certain program whos's name escapes me... not enough ram so its useless to me lol

or theirs yellow dog linux, i have it set up on my ps3 and its pretty neat

Ubuntu Home Page | Ubuntu

theres the ubuntu page

but i think you can make a thing called a live cd from that site, and all it is is you burn it to a dvd, then stick it in and reboot your computer, to boot from your dvd drive(you might have to change your bios settings its F9 on startup i think)

then it launches ubuntu without installing anything, its just a test environment so you can see if your interested

good luck

 

From the sound of it bkadoctaj's already got a couple of different distributions installed and just needs to learn about them now.

 

Look into Gentoo. The documentation on that distro is top notch. Plus if you master that you mastered unix in general.

 

Yeah, the Gentoo wiki has topics covering just about everything and a lot of it carries over to other distros, too.

 

I HIGHLY suggest Ubuntu. I started with Ubuntu and still use it. It has a very nice interface, it's easy for beginners and has lots of nice eye candy. Download it here Download Ubuntu | Ubuntu

If you have any questions ask me or sign up here Ubuntu Forums

Good luck!

 

Mac is linux. They both use the same kernal.

 

It's been a year since I used linux so I'll try my best.

The swap is a boot-up. It's very neat feature for linux. It makes the boot up faster because it's has it own partition and no files will save in that partition. If your OS gets messed up, clean it and reinstall it on that same partition. You will not lose any information in other partition. Unless you format it or get virus, etc. The home is your administer while others are guest/you.

actually, I think home is your programs. Other partition is your files.

 

With linux what you've got to do is DO it. it will have you ripping your hair out, but it's still fun. I would suggest you install your own linux, and configure it, even on a spare drive or something so you still have the others, so you just have the experiance. And don't be afraid of the command line. It's just like the terminal in os X, it's a UNIX command line, and it's not hard to learn to use, and you must be able to use it to be a capable linux user.

 

No, the swap partition is like a pagefile for Windows. The kernel can use it to temporarily store parts of memory it doesn't expect it'll need for a while in favor of using the actual RAM for the things it will need.

/home is where your user configuration gets stored.

Under Windows the user configuration is a bloody mess and gets sprayed everywhere. That can happen to a certain extent with Linux, but for the most part your user configuration files for software and whatnot live in your /home/username directory (don't see them? do ls -a; the default behavior in Linux and other Linux-like operating systems is to hide files whose names begin with a period. You can also hit control-H in the file-browser on GNOME to do the same thing).

Ish. They're both Unix-based so it'll help you get a sense of how, in general, to work the command-line on a UNIX-based system. They use different implementations of the same commands, however, (I believe OS X borrowed their utilities from FreeBSD whereas most of Linux uses GNU Coreutils- different packages to provide the same commands) so the behaviors for certain flags can differ.

You don't really need to keep / and /home on separate partitions, anymore than you have to keep My Documents on a separate partition on Windows. It's just a recommended practice so if you hose your system installation you don't have to worry about backing up documents, you can just reinstall the system and remount your old /home directory.

If you don't keep any precious information on your Linux installation then there's no need to separate out / and /home.

An extended partition is a hack to work around the limitations of the way PC's lay out their partitions. A primary partition is a plain old partition, and you're allowed to have four of them under the partition label format (basically, just a part of the hard drive that specifies where the partitions begin and end) that ended up being the standard on PC's. Obviously there are cases where people might possibly want more than that, so a hack was devised to allow you to subdivide a partition into more "extended" partitions.

And logical volume management is basically taking the idea of partitions and extending it via software. You can use it to tell your operating system to, say, treat two separate partitions as one partition and stripe the data across the two drives (this is useful if you want to combine storage from two separate disks), or you can use it to tell the system to write the same data to two different partitions so you have a way to know if your data gets corrupted (because the odds are strongly in favor of data from one drive becoming corrupted and not the other, or both of them getting corrupted but in different ways. Either way, all you need to know is your "mirrors" don't match), that kind of thing.

 

Sort of. It's still not a bad idea, especially when you're first learning, but if you don't potentially want to mess around with extended partitions it's just as safe to keep them on the same partition.

/var, /usr and friends are all part of the way UNIX operating systems lay themselves out. The official standard that is a good general guide to how they work is the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard.

Basically, the UNIX philosophy to applications is to attract like file to like file. Under Windows, if you install an application, it installs into its own directory and that's where all the configuration files, binary application files, library files, and log files for that app go.

UNIX spreads them out. Binary files go into the same directory, library files go into another directory, log files go elsewhere. I guess this facilitates confusing the hell out of newcomers who want to know where Firefox is in the filesystem.

Don't bother to memorize all the standard locations. It's good enough to have a sense of what the general divisions are- ie, what general kind of file goes under /usr.

Asking questions is the smart way to go. I learned all this by breaking things and frantically googling for answers.

And regarding the whole mounting thing: All files on UNIX accessible by a path from the root (/) directory, which is located on your root partition. All files. Every last goddamn one of them. Even if you're accessing a file located on a hard drive on the other end of the world, it shows up somewhere on the root filesystem. The way to make that work is if you have another filesystem- be that a partition on a flash drive, a Windows file share, or whatever- you "mount" it on the root filesystem by associating it with a directory. So if you plug in a flash drive, it doesn't show up as "D:" drive or whatever, the system makes a directory (usually under /media) and associates the drive with that directory. Then to get to the files on that drive, you just navigate to that directory. The mount point is just the place on the filesystem where your volume is mounted.

The main benefit of doing that is it helps take some of the pain out of working with files across a network- you just mount it under a directory and any application is able to access it, no matter how primitive, because the operating system is handling all the network-related stuff. The application just has to know how to treat it like it's a file on a local filesystem.

It's also nice because you can spread your system across multiple hard drives. If you really really really don't want to lose, say, your system configuration files (which live in /etc) you can put them on a different hard drive somewhere else in the world and just access it remotely and if disaster strikes at home your configuration is safe.

For the first one, I think so but I'm not sure, because I've never worked with extended partitions, and for the second, it's almost certainly not necessary for home use (though some distributions like to install to logical volumes- Fedora did that for a while, and I think it still might). That kind of functionality is, I think, more useful for servers and business users.

 

Yeah, don't worry about it! I got nothing else going on this lazy Sunday afternoon, and am happy to help out a new Linux user .

Almost every major distribution- Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSUSE, etc- are all smart enough to handle local storage automatically these days. Hard drives, CD burners, removable disks shouldn't be a problem. Plus, USB drives are pretty much so alike that you'll probably never run across a USB drive that won't work with Linux.

If you're working in the lower levels of the system- ie, you're trying to mount a network share from the command-line- it can get a little hairy (for information on how to do that if, heaven forbid, you should need to: man mount), but THANK GOD both KDE and GNOME have graphical interfaces for mounting shares like that. For like Windows shares you can go to the Places menu in GNOME and select "Network", then just browse to your workgroup/share. It'll ask you for your username/password if you need one, then it'll mount it for you.

It'll try to present it to you like OS X does and try to hide the mount-point.

 

You may find Linux etremely confusing or if you're like me, very convient and easy. I would however prefer OSx or XP over it but it all gets the work done. Linux looks very boring on the outside but is, in my opinion, very compatitble with most of my programs I use, easy interfaces, doesn't take extraneous RAM or bits of your HD to run, and is great for being free. I say you should try it out, don't like it - then just clear it off your system and run your old OS. This may sound harder than it seems though and it can be a bit frustrating at times so I'd go with just asking a friend or someone from Bestbuy for a look inside.