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Dave you and I are in the same boat, I find myself needing to know Linux but unfortunately haven't had much time to spend on it yet.

I did grab this book and find it great though:

http://www.sobell.com/CMDREF1/index.html

Good luck and if you find a really good course let me know, I may end up taking it with you.

i can donate you guys with suse evaluation / suse full version pro & knoppix on CD's. I have some copies of them

Teaching is an art.. but a piece of heck too..

Well as a former Unix admin, I know a lot of command line linux.

Not much of the newer stuff though.

guys the best to learn linux is to just buy an old PIII machine and install it .. or hack on a virtual machine ..

There are so many help forums, documentation and newsgroups that really attending a course is a waste of money IMHO.

if anyone has any quick questions i can answer here no problemo, been using linux for 10 years now

Maad seems to be an old chap !!

Keep the IT Support coming in !! Cheers

Thank you all Ian, Ahamed, Maad for your offers to help. I've installed Knoppix on a machine at work. Once I'm able to focus a little on it, I'll be posting questions on here

Cheers

ahamed wrote:Maad seems to be an old chap !!

or a geek from a young age

I think Fedora would be the best to use for people to learn, however keep in mind that most Linux distributions these days are very easy to install and in most cases you don't learn much. The best way to learn is to install just the basic packages with Gnome or KDE and install Apache/Sendmail by hand....

As far as courses go, has anyone done their RHCE?

anything in progress with you n linux?

ahamed wrote:anything in progress with you n linux?

yeah he dumped it for Windows.....

heheheheheh .. i doubted.. he dint have enough patience

you need a lot of patience for Linux, it just isn't user friendly at all, and whilst a lot of steps have been taken to make it user friendly, they have had to sacrafice some of the flexibility of Linux along the way.

I don't think Linux is a desktop OS, and it's not something you should be working on every day. The best Linux/Unix systems are set and forget, i.e. you set them up, and if setup right they don't bug you.

I setup a Linux box once for a friend to take care of many things including NAT, DHCP, Firewall, IRC Server, FTP and Web Serving, and then just left it. It still runs today and that was 4 years ago, and it is still working fine. It could perhaps do with an upgrade, but he'll need someone else to address that when the time comes.

If you have to play with it everyday, you're doing something wrong, or coding for the Linux environment.

agreeing with ^ian^ ..

alrite i just wanna know wots the advantages of using linux over windows. i mean wots so special about it its just another operating system or iz there some so special that u guys are not gonna tell me :p

In short.. stability, performance and security.

In long.. the design of a Unix OS generally provides a much more stable system since where when things go wrong, it's just one tiny portion of the overall system that is affected, and this bit can usually be stopped/restarted independently of other things to correct the problem. Conversely, the internal architecture of Windows is a bit of a house of cards so when one little bit goes wrong it cascades through other things and oops.. blue screen of death and the only way to fix the problem is a full system reboot. XP and Win2k3 are vast improvements on what's gone before them, but the problem is deep rooted and never truly eradicated.

Performance is based on stability, and most Unix apps are a little more code efficient than Windows stuff, so they get more done in fewer CPU cycles and need less resources to acomplish things.

The same principles apply to security. In many respects individual components of a Unix OS are just as insecure as windows. However Unix is a multi-user environment, so when an inidividual part of the system has been compromised you're usually running as a user that can't achieve or do much harm to other parts of the system. Windows is a multi-user hack built on top of a single user system. If you compromise one part of the system it's staggeringly easy to obtain superuser admin rights on the entire OS and then you can do real damage - hence Windows has the security issues (and reputation) that it has.

If you want Unix stability, mixed with great performance, and better security, the ability to tinker at the command line to boost your Unix knowledge but still want a polished desktop experience that doesn't confuse the arse off you in minutes go buy a Mac )

SDB

IMHO
MS Rocks...
Windows... anyday..

Linux may b a secure, stable and a multi tasking OS.
but its not user friendly, there are lots of new flavours coming up that have good gui but still fail at this one point.

It all comes down to what you want to achieve and how much time you want to spend administering your solution. The knowledge level required to setup a Unix box to do things will be higher than setting up a Windows box, but then the Windows box will need regular attention to keep services running and the security threats addressed whereas the Unix box can be pretty much left to fend for itself in a corner somewhere "just doing what it's supposed to do". I've been an admin level IT user for a decade now and I don't particularly like Unix because it's more complex to work with *but* my experience tells me that it's still the better option for anything you need to be seriously reliable.

..but this discussion could go on forever, so lets just say we have different preferences and save a lot of finger-work on keyboards!

SDB

yep .. and with linux kernal you can do wonders...

You should try mandrake or suse .. gr8 GUI & interfaces .. will feel like u r on windows