[lug] New to the group

[Crawford Rainwater]

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

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