Getting in over my head?

[RobKendrick]

Hi, everyone!

Thanks for the abrupt welcome to the Linuxforums community. I have a feeling I'll be coming back here fairly often, both for support and to share the knowledge I gain with others who will arrive after me.

I've dabbled in Linux on and off for years. I'm comfortable with the POSIX path system (forward-slashes just make sense), and I like the simplicity of a lot of Linux commands. I also like the fact that everything in Linux is treated, more or less, like a file of some sort, so if a file disappears, the system doesn't always freak out like Windows does.

That said, I'm concerned I may be getting in over my head. I grabbed Ubuntu 8.04 and installed it so I could build a Hylafax server. I have a Zonet v.92 PCI faxmodem installed, and while I can interface with the modem directly via cu -l ttyAGS3, I can't get Hylafax to do so.

On top of that, I find myself stumped and scrambling for answers at things I take for granted in Windows, such as the ability to easily grab print drivers from a server on my LAN.

Does any one have any suggestions to help get me up-to-speed? I try to do as much stuff as possible from the command line via OpenSSH (using Cygwin from an XP machine), so I'm becoming familiar with nano, apt-get, sudo, and the like.

Many thanks!
Rob Kendrick
"Greenhorn"

[oz]

Welcome to the forums!

You can check the link in my signature to see if there's anything there you don't already know about Linux.

A good command line site is:

LinuxCommand.org: Learn the Linux command line. Write shell scripts.

If you haven't found vim (or vi) yet for text editing, you can run vimtutor from the command line to get a quick but sufficient lesson to get you started with it.

Do let us know how it's all coming along for you.

[RobKendrick]

Thanks for the info, Ozar! The Linuxcommand.org site looks awesome; I'm on it.

I already use BBLean for my Windows shell rather than the Start Menu, so I do as much as possible via the keyboard anyway (thanks to BBKeys).

It looks like this will not at all be a quick & easy thing; I need to really dedicate some time to learning Linux as a complete OS, and when I do, I'll probably find it's the OS I've always dreamed of having but never took the time to learn.

Thanks again.
Take care!
Rob Kendrick