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Links for Linux Newbies

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by oneamazingwriter

Closed to new repliesThis discussion is closed. It stays readable, but it takes no new replies.

I haven't as yet installed Linux, but I have found a couple of links to help me to do so, and I thought I would share them with others who may be considering doing so.

Basic Linux Training: http://www.basiclinux.net/

Basic Linux download, for those with an older computer: http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/baslinux/

I'll be reading a lot more before I attempt in install, but I'm too curious now NOT to do so.

49 replies

by oneamazingwriter

and I mailed it to my girlfriend's husband in Australia.

I've been digging and reading, and hoping something clicks. I sent you a peer mail with questions right before I found this posting.

by oneamazingwriter

Aargh! This means I have to commit to doing this!

Got any links out there that give virtual sedatives?

I have a case of End User Trauma!

by navy moose

I have the relevant parts of the Linux Documentation Project downloaded on my PC. I prefer books over online documentation.

I have two books which are designed for Windows admins to learn Linux. These two books all but ignore the GUI and are pure command line interface (CLI).

The titles are:
"Linux Administration: A Beginners Guide" by Steve Shah. Published by Osborne. ISBN: 0-07-226259-1

"A Practical Guide to Linux: Commands, Editors, and Shell Programming" by Mark Sobell. Published by Prentice Hall. ISBN: 0-13-147823-0

Good luck and enjoy Open Source!

Navy Moose

by oneamazingwriter

I clicked on your profile and it's comic, because I moved from Westfield, MA to Trenton, NJ and wind up receiving help from a MA man!
I love the Internet! :D
I, too, like to kick back with hard copy. I'll look into these.

by apotheon

I've never run across anyone else who'd heard of the [i]Practical Guide[/i] before. I've been pushing that book on anyone that would listen since I first got a copy, shortly after it was published. It's quite possibly the best general-purpose Linux book on the market.

by wire

Personally I use BeOS OS (free)

Boot in 15 sec and install time 10 min. - who can beat this ?

by apotheon

He's only trolling to stir up controversy because the more vitriolic the discussion gets, the more people will see his stupid little spam link.

by apotheon

I've been thanked for that service a number of times before, offering new words for people to learn.

--
Apotheonic Labs, encouraging vocabulary expansion for three decades and counting.

by oneamazingwriter

Thanks, Palmetto. Typically Beth, I started reading "Pleae Read: Before creating a new thread", and got sidetracked by a link there to the parody MS Linux site! :D At this rate when I am 80 and done laughing I will actually do an install!

by jaqui

now I'm going to have to deal with oaw's crazed questions there as well! ;)

by deadly ernest

than Windows now. In recent months I have tried Mandrake 10, Fedora Core 4, and Ubuntu. I now have the very latest version of Ubuntu and Fedora Core 5 to try. I have found that FC4 is realy aimed at the end user but quite good, I am hoping FC5 is better as the only fault I had with FC4 was that it did not allow you to do some of the very advanced disk management stuff after you had finished installing it.

by oneamazingwriter

There's a meeting once a month in the town next to me! It will be great to physically meet people and get a chance to talk to them. Thanks, Col :x

by lukcad

i have just found that there are a lot of version of linux: http://www.linuxhq.com/kernel/index.html here. And first question (i never installed linux yet) is next: how fast i can change old version of linux on new one and is it convinient and simple or it is process that requires a lot of settings?

by hal 9000

But it really depends on what you are using and how hard it was to install initially. Generally you only need to do upgrades when there are new Kernels brought out.

The rest is really just Window Dressing and easy to work with and best of all you don't need to do a reboot unless you are doing a Kernal upgrade.

When you start changing Kernals you will have about as much trouble as upgrading from Win 98 to XP maybe a bit less maybe a bit more it really depends here on just how happy you are to work in a different enviroment to Windows. Most of the time spent in setting up any OS is used in tweaking the installs and locking down the finished product and that can take quite a lot of time if you want to dig deeply.

On the up side any form of Linx as a straight install is generally speaking more secure and requires less tweaking than any Windows install so I find them easier to use but they are different and each Distro has its own unique things to look out for.

Col

by jaqui

fast? no

upgrades tend to take longer than installs do, but they keep every setting you have for your configuration, including user specific settings.

by hal 9000

Why am I being told that the [b]Grub[/b] will not work correctly in my computer and how did it get a Grub in it? :^0

Will this stop Windows from working as well? :D

Col ]:)

by jaqui

GRUB = GRand Unified Bootloader

There is only one hardware supplier that creates products on which GRUB is useless, and that is APPLE, the open firmaware bios used is the bootloader and won't work with GRUB in the same fashion as a Microcomputer, Mini Computer or Mainframe will. You'll have to get a ppc version of your distro to use it on the MAC. :p

why on earth would you want to have windows and macos and linux on one system?

by oneamazingwriter

on your avatar, Jaqui. Yours is the only "mystery man" avatar that is looking at a monitor, so that you actually look like you might know what you are doing!

:x :D

by navy moose

I found these two books on Amazon and if you bought one, the second one was discounted further. I read the reviews and they looked great. When the books arrived, I was pleased by the material covered. I had bought another book, which spent far too much on covering the GUI and using Linux as a workstation.

I keep both books next to my Linux server as a ready reference.

by apotheon

Most mainstream Linux books are very Red Hat centric and very focused on the GUI. They all seem to assume you have both KDE and GNOME installed, and are probably using GNOME as your main user environment.

One of the more impressive things about the [i]Practical Guide[/i] is that it is entirely distro-agnostic and ignores the GUI entirely.

by navy moose

I didn't mind the books being RH centric, I'm running Fedora Core 5 :-)

Seriously, I understand what you're saying. One of my co-workers is running Debian and another is running slash dot. They both rely on online documentation.

by alangeek

OAW, if you'd like to try out Linux without having to go through the hassle of actually installing it on your PC, you can try a live CD version such as SuSE 10 (actually a live DVD in this case) which will run directly from the CD or DVD. That way you can try it out and see if you like it before actually installing it. Personally, I like SuSE pretty well, and have 4 boxes running it at home, as well as a dozen or so here at work.

Knoppix is a live CD that is especially good at hardware recognition, comes with a bunch of applications and games, and has lots of valuable utilities. Many techies consider Knoppix to be a "Swiss Army knife for the PC" as it can read and write many different file formats, such as NTFS, FAT32, HPFS (OS/2), not to mention all the standard Linux formats. It also supports USB devices quite nicely, including scanners, printers, digital cameras, and PDAs. It will even work well with many bluetooth and wireless devices and other networking devices.

Knoppix can be installed to the hard drive, but you probably won't want to do that; it was intended to run from the CD or DVD and is a highly customized (or bastardized) conglomeration of Debian-based stuff. Works well by itself, but you wouldn't want to try to update stuff on it.

Hope this helps you a little!

-Alan

by oneamazingwriter

It does help.
I don't have a windows CD, so once I commit it's done. I want to learn as I go along. Knowing that I can try things out first is important to me. Coming at this stuff so late in life, and through a back door has been odd, but after reading so much here, I've felt as if I would lose out too much if I just kept reading and didn't try to apply what I read. I'm still studying. The one thing about being a late arrival is that I have finally learned to take things slowly at first.
If it wasn't for 1-click Answers I wouldn't have had a clue what anyone was talking about here. I'm slowly learning the language, and it's great to sit at the PC and have some of the mystery gone from it.
oaw

by hal 9000

And Experiment a bit until you come up with something that you like.

That could be as easy as shrinking the Windows Partition and installing a form of Nix to the remaining part of the HDD. That way you could keep both systems and work on Windows when required and Nix when required.

Or you could add another HDD and do exactly the same thing leave the Windows Install alone and use the other HDD for Nix. You'll get the option of chosing which OS to boot into when you start the computer and if you finially want to switch to a form of Nix you'll be able to save all your Data on the Windows Partition as just about every version of Nix will read NTFS Partitions.

Col

by oneamazingwriter

I found this link on a post that Jaqui made on another thread:
http://www.zegeniestudios.net/ldc/index.php

But it says upon arrival:

"This test requires javascript and cookies enabled to work."

I use Firefox with Scripts disabled and a window comes up when a site wants to offer a cookie, and I tend to click NO immediately. I'll need to stop doing that, because now I can't access the site properly! (Hopefully after a reboot it will offer me that choice again. Right now I'm stuck. A lot of the stuff I learn comes from doing it wrong the first time.)

It's odd that a site for Linux distros would only be available by enabling Scripts.

by apotheon

In Firefox:

Edit > Preferences > Privacy > Cookies > Exceptions

Find the cookie handling exceptions for the URL you want to be able to access, and remove their listings.

Unfortunately, the interface for this is not as smooth as it could be -- it doesn't have as good a search capability as I would like. You should be able to take care of it, though, by finding that part of the Preferences settings. I've had to do this a few times myself.

by jaqui

not when you concider it's a questionaire that you complete, then it scans your answers to see which distros fit them best.

the javascript is the questionaire page on it.

I personally don't have scripting enabled either, but cookies I set default accept policy for Originating site, with explicit privacy policy, flag no privacvy policy site cookies, and reject 3rd party cookies.
so, the advertising cookies get rejected, and the site / session cookies get accepted.

by jaqui

maybe not. a lot of distros are only allowing root to write to ntfs. While editing the mount options of the partition isn't hard, to allow non root use of ntfs partition, it's a nasty shock for a newbie to get..they have to edit the hard drive to write to windows?!?!?!?

When people are dual booting a system, I usually reccomend they make a small partition, say about one gig, and make that fat, use it to transfer files between operating systems, easier than explaining the steps to edit the permissions of the ntfs partition.

edited for typo

by oneamazingwriter

I am "listening". If this job I work on lasts long enough I am thinking about a second hard drive. (I hate "if"). I tend to learn through repitition, so I keep reading. I'm growing more comfortable with the language and grasping a few more of the concepts. I want to know that I really "get" what is being said before I make any permanent change.
What's been said about a live CD (to give me an idea of what Linux is all about) looks pretty good to me.
It must be hard for you guys to watch me hesitate at all. I wouldn't, if I knew someone else was doing all of this. Since I'm the one doing it...I need to feel confident first that I understand.

by deadly ernest

and some will not read partitions that are not mounted at the time of initial installation and then have difficulty getting the Windows format partitions mounted later. And some will read NTFS but not write to it. Most of these problems can be corrected later with the installation of extra software, but I think OAW wants something that will work out of the box. However I have found that all will read and write to FAT 32.

I have been carefully treading this path myself for several months and tried many Linux variants and my baseline conclusion at the moment is that you set up additional partitions for the Linux and one is a data partition formatted FAT32. Once the Linux installation is going you can then dual boot to your Windows and have it recognise the Linux FAT 32 partition - thus that partition can then be shared between the two for data.

One odd problem I have found is that often if the partition has been set up as FAT 32 under Windows XP the Linux system has great trouble changing the permissions to allow use under Linux. Not a problem when dual booting with Win 98 - curiouser and curiouser. Hope to find out why one day.

by hal 9000

The following are currently available and a joy to use Knoppix at

http://www.knoppix.net/get.php

And if you go back to the Home Page there is also documatition and other nice stuff.

Ubuntu Live 5.1 from

http://www.ubuntu.com/download
or
http://mirror.mcs.anl.gov/pub/ubuntu-iso/CDs/5.10/

And again the Home Page has some interesting stuff. Here you can chose the different versions of the Live CD'd or a Full Install version again for the different Platforms. And again the Home page has some interesting links as well.

Or for something really simple to install and use you can not beat the old Corel Linux which was really a Desktop Linux and is now quite old but it's simple to install easy to work with and MS brought a large chunck of shares in Corel and demanded that they stop developing Linux OS and Software.

http://public.www.planetmirror.com/pub/corel/linux/1.2/?fl=

They are only a few of the options but once you take the first step you'll enjoy it.

Col

by oneamazingwriter

I think it's time for me to set a deadline for myself to actually download some things to disk, so I will read more today and set tomorrow as the day to sit here and burn! burn! burn!
The live CD seems like the best route for me to take right now.

by ontheropes

You say, ??but I'm too curious now NOT to do so.? I know exactly what you mean.
I?m slowly becoming less ignorant about Linux. The more I research it here at TR and on the Web the more determined I am to get it installed on my main PC.
I?ll keep Windows on a seperate drive. I?ve got a couple of empty hard drive bays and I?m going to get another hard drive for Linux only. That way it?s just a quick reboot and a BIOS change to boot from whatever drive I need.
Reading what Apotheon has to say about Linux prompted me to go to our only bookstore and buy the one Linux book they had, ?Linux for Dummies?. The title seemed appropriate and the bonus DVD includes a few distros.

by apotheon

If you need some guidance, there are several of us here that would be only too willing to help as much as we can. You might also look into local Linux User Groups (LUGs). You can probably find one near you here:
http://www.linux.org/groups/index.html

I should probably start bookmarking all the references to people saying my influence has helped them decide to try something new. It'd be handy to have a list the next time some "there's only one way" fanatic calls me an elitist that only alienates people and "will never change anyone's mind."

by hal 9000

You like Debian and there are way to few of us in that area well here on TR at least. :(

Col ]:)

by hal 9000

I caught myself telling a customer to log in as Root and then realised that he's using XP so I did a quick reboot and started XP off and cured his problem and then decided that I had better use it for some time to remain semi famaliar with it. Well within 3 days IE6 had failed and I couldn't reinstall it as I was constantly told that I had a newer version already installed even though it no longer worked so I tried IE7 Beta thinking that well it's going to come with Vista so it should be realitively stable and it worked for about 2 hours or so and then failed as well. :_|

So I've reverted to Firefox and am using XP and posting from there knowing all the time that there is a Debian Install on the same workstation and kicking myself for ever booting into XP which is going to now require a reinstall as the IE6 is showing a used disk space of 0.00 with IE7 uninstalled. :^0

But think of it this way the MS Zombie Elitest where the ones using NT while all the others where using 95. :p

Some days I wonder [b]WHY[/b] I bother working with Computers. :D

Col ]:)

by deadly ernest

rest of us - to really improve you have to move up to being a sado-masochist and learn how to whip yourself as you crawl back into your hole. A nice medium length whip with a short handle gives good hits without getting in the way. Now goa away and practice.

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