For those new to Linux who may have been following along...
If you're serious about getting into Linux, check out any of the books put out by Mark G. Sobell. Amazon page
here. If you need information, search no further. Here is bedrock.
Start with either Fedora or Ubuntu - and work your way through either his
Fedora or
Ubuntu specific titles.
You can also supplement either book with one of the O'Reilly "Hacks" titles. There are versions specifically for Ubuntu and Fedora. These give you short well written chapters for dealing with common niggling issues plus instructions for fun/useful stuff to do - all in a handy cookbook format.
If you want to go beyond that, you can then pick up a copy of his
A Practical Guide to Linux Commands, Editors, and Shell Programming. Lots more good stuff here starting at the intermediate user level and moving well into the expert range.
Another superb title (and pretty much the current bible of all things Linux) is
UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook. If you want to do something with Linux as a career, this tome is a must have. And forget the MAN pages. They are written by experts for experts. This book spells things out in plain-speak. Or at least as much as is possible. (Note: Some things are
never going to be completely easy to get your head around until you start actively using them. And even then, some parts of Linux are just plain hard to grasp or deal with. Remember: even experts have to RTFM every so often. And when they do, this is the "FM" they usually reach for.)
Also check out the
Distrowatch website and prepare to sample the bounty of distros and packages available to a Linux user. And all at no charge.
If you want to experience a very elegant desktop environment, give
Linux Mint a try. If you want something a little more 'ninja' try
CrunchBang Linux. For full blown bells & whistles check out
Pinguy OS or
Sabayon.
...or put a second NIC card in an old PC you have gathering dust, and turn it into a full-bore commercial grade firewall network appliance that can easily hold its own against products that would otherwise cost hundreds if not thousands by downloading and installing
pfSense or
Smoothwall Express on it.
...or build a very capable home server with
FreeNAS...
...or network gateway server appliance with
Zenytal or
ClearOS...or build a home theater media server using
XBMC or a DVR box with
MythTV.
Or even better...if you
really want to understand how Linux works, try a modern bare metal distro like
Arch Linux where you need to set everything up by hand - but end up with a completely customized desktop or server that does exactly what
you want it to do the way you want to do it. (And also become an expert user in the process.)
I could (maybe do?
) go on and on...
One of these days I'm going to have to write this all up once and for all and put it in a PDF for download.
