[lug] New to the group

[Jason Barnes]

Thank you everyone for the great suggestions. I am going to download a few different distros that you have suggested and install them on VirtualBox to play around with before I install it on my laptop. I have picked up a book called "Linux Command Line and Shell Scripting" by Richard Blum and Christine Bresnahan. Not exactly sure if this is what I am looking for at the moment but it will help later on if it is not.

So far I have Ubuntu 12.04 installed and Linux Mint the xfce version. 

Thank you again
Jason


________________________________
 From: Alex samide <absamide at yahoo.com>
To: Boulder (Colorado) Linux Users Group -- General Mailing List <lug at lug.boulder.co.us> 
Sent: Monday, August 19, 2013 2:39 PM
Subject: Re: [lug] New to the group
 


Another place to consider looking would be http://virtualboxes.org/ where you can download already built images to try out on a Virtualbox environment.

I would always recommend doing installs for the experience, but many of the distributions have quite simple and straight forward installs now a days, so there could be times when you just want to download an already existing image to play around with and the images on that site are good for that.

Plus they have the websites listed for each of the distributions next to the image link so that you can investigate them individually if you wanted.

Alex Samide




________________________________
 From: Crawford Rainwater <crawford.rainwater at linux-etc.com>
To: lug at lug.boulder.co.us 
Sent: Monday, August 19, 2013 9:44 AM
Subject: Re: [lug] New to the group
 

Jason:

For the most part, Linux is similar "behind the scenes" on the "bare metal".  The differences is in package management and installation between distribution A and distribution B as well as release cycles of said packages (e.g., Fedora is a bit "bleeding edge" in releases, Debian is a bit "slower" on their "stable" stream, CentOS and Scientific Linux parallel RedHat more or less).

So if you really want to learn Linux, start at the command line and build up from there.  Yes, it is not as "sexy" nor "pretty" cosmetically initially.  However, you will get the most out of such from this approach.  There are quite a few "LiveCD/DVD" distributions as well such as Ubuntu, Mint and Knoppix (just to name two; these are variants of Debian as well) as well as "minimalist" distributions as well.  The LiveDVD/CD distributions have different desktop environments (I believe Knoppix has 3-4 to pick from on their LiveDVD for
 example) so you can "test drive" with minimal effort of installation time.

Then there is the virtualization approach of taking a distribution (or three) of choice, then doing some R&D (= research and destroy/discover) within the virtual machine containers.  Vagrant (a favor for "devops" folks) is quite a popular one for such that can be built upon VMware, Virtualbox, KVM, and some other hypervisors.

Training material wise, there are a few trainer types (including myself) so you can inquire with the LUG lists or go for something a bit more formal.  I am not sure what DeVry has to offer course wise, so I cannot advise either way there.  There are two certification tracks (RedHat oriented and LPI oriented) to go for such avenues if that is desired in time.

So some more to digest and process.  HTH.

--- Crawford

The Linux ETC Company
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Westminster, CO 80031 USA
voice: 
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