New to linux

[farruk23]

I'm currently a student in NC and i've used linux very little. Everyone says it's very different, but so far it seems pretty normal. THe major difference is different names. Does anyone know some good resources for someone trying to get their feet wet? Install was a breeze, but should I create User Accounts and is running on the root dangerous? I'm using this under the VMWare workstation and i'd like to learn alot, learn how to write scripts and I need help with the terminal. I see that this bash shell looks very complicated. I'm using the fedora core 4 red hat linux desktop.

thanks for any help, Jonathan

[reed9]

Hello and welcome.

User Accounts and is running on the root dangerous?

Yes and yes.

fedora core 4 red hat linux desktop.

Er. This doesn't make sense. Fedora and Redhat are different distributions. Fedora 4 is ancient and totally unsupported. Redhat Enterprise Linux 4 is supported until 2012, I think it is, but is also pretty old.

If you are using RHEL, and don't have a license, I recommend moving to one of the free (as in beer) Redhat clones, like Scientific Linux or CentOS. Or you might consider a more desktop oriented distro.

There are many free tutorials and books online on shell scripts.
bash scripting - Google Search

Linux Online - Free Online Books

[D-cat]

I think Farruk just got a little confused because Fedora was the community response to Red Hat dropping its public distro.

Fedora 4 is very old and unnecessarily bare compared to what's available today. You should see into getting something newer. If you are specifically looking for Red Hat, then I second to go with CentOS; it is literally the RHEL source files and a touch of rebranding, nothing more. CentOS effectively gives you RHEL without the license requirement or subsequently the commercial support... but that's why we're here!

If you're used to DOS or Windows CLI at all, Posix isn't really more difficult to use, just a few small differences. Tree navigation (sans / vs \ ), program launching, redirectors, and pipes pretty much all work the same. Shell scripting however is necessarily more complicated, but this is the trade for significantly more power.

A couple of useful cli quickstarts:
Linux Commands - A practical reference
Linux Newbie Guide: Shortcuts And Commands

[farruk23]

There is a red hat menu at the top left corner. I'm using VMWare, so I can install as many OS as I want, expecially considering its open source. Which linux version do you think is the best to start on or are they all pretty similiar? I'm taking a class and the book came with fedora core 4 disks. The gui in this OS does remind me of something ancient.

[farruk23]

I would like to learn off the Red Hat distribution. Their headquaters are like a 2 minute walk from where im going to be finishing my degree. (NCState) I've heard alot about a few others too, mainly ubuntu and solaris.

[reed9]

If you want to learn Redhat Enterprise Linux, I would go with Scientific Linux for CentOS, which are both clones of redhat. They are built using the Redhat sources.

The downside of using an Enterprise distro is that they are very conservative about updating the software in their repos. So, for example, the lates RHEL uses a 2.6.18 kernel, while the latest Fedora uses a 2.6.31 kernel. 2.6.18 was released in 2006 and 3 years is a huge gap in open source software. That also means that unless they specifically backported drivers, new hardware may not be supported in an older kernel.

The benefit of this conservatism is less bugs and more stability. Also, enterprise distros are supported for many years, whereas a Fedora release is only supported for around 13 months, so you're kind of pushed into upgrading to new releases more frequently.

So if you want access to newer software and features, and a more usual "desktop" environment, I would go with Fedora, which as Redhat's community offering, still does things very similarly to Redhat. Otherwise go with one of the clones as I mentioned, but be prepared to have more difficulty with newer hardware and probably wireless cards.

As you said, though, they are free, so I would really encourage you to try many different linux distros to really get a sense of what is the same, what is different, and how they work, as well as decide what you really like.