hi there

[tranzed]

Hi, just want to say hi and take this opportunity to say thanks in advance for all the help I know I will need.

As a newbie to linux... I have been a user for about five months. My old ms hadda broke down for the last time and has been permanently erased from my life.

I was surprised when all I had to do was download a live cd, boot and a few clicks later everything worked. wow

It will come as no surprise then that now my interest has deepened somewhat so I am on a quest to further the knowledge and understanding. I bought a book (a good place to start) LPC-1 which explains most things.

Could anyone suggest other good books for people with L plates?

[impert]

Hi, and welcome,

all I had to do was download a live cd, boot and a few clicks later everything worked. wow

That's almost a pity - fixing things is a way of learning, and character building too.

I use Unix in a Nutshell (O'Reilly) you can get it second-hand for very little. Linux in a Nutshell might be even better, but U.I.N covers GNU/Linux, Mac OS/X and Solaris, since all are based on Unix.
For the terminal don't forget the man command. Use it before using any command that you're not sure about,eg
man chown, man cfdisk etc, and use man man to learn the syntax of the man pages. It's sometimes a bit terse, but it's free and it is generally the most accurate for the system it's installed on.
Perhaps later you might try multi-booting. More systems> more problems > more learning. Seriously.

[nujinini]

As a newbie to linux... I have been a user for about five months.

Hi and welcome!

I was a total idiot on linux when I joined a year ago.

Learned quite a lot of things here. Hope you will too!

Enjoy!

[masam]

1). you might want to pick up a copy of the Linux Bible, it also has a few distro's and alot of info as far as how/what/huh? for linux.

2). google is your best friend...."howto ______"(ie. "howto ifconfig", "howto networking", etc.)[you will want to squeeze as many keywords into the input line as possible!!!]

3). NEVER be afraid to ask. there are no stupid question, just stupid answers, and a few flamers on the internet to call you a noob.....ugghhh....

4). remember, there will always be those smarter than you, and those that are not smarter than you. just try to help the "noobs" and remember where you came from
hehe.

enjoy your adventure!

[Mudgen]

You have a wonderful journey ahead. You'll learn best by doing, and googling, and posting, and doing some more. You might find Linux Torvald's "Just For Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary" good for background and philosophy of Linux. You can find it online in its entirety. Also check out Eric Raymond's essay on asking questions:
How To Ask Questions The Smart Way

Although Eric can be quite full of himself, this essay is pretty much spot on. It's bemusing how many people post the equivalent of "On my hopelessly misconfigured system that I'm not going to give you any details about, things don't work right. Why is that?". In 25 years of training and managing systems engineers, and being one, one of the things I've hammered on is that useful problem reports include, at a bare minimum:
--What did you do? Specifically.
--What should have happened?
--What happened?

[ef87]

hello and welcome! i have a question i question to ask but cant until i get 15 posts! +1

[Mudgen]

hello and welcome! i have a question i question to ask but cant until i get 15 posts! +1

Is that because you need to include a URL?

[ef87]

yes thats what the error says but im not trying to spam or promote anything, the question just happens to include localhost:80

[Mudgen]

You can probably just obfuscate it a bit, like
http-colon-slash-slash-localhost-colon-80
and people will know what you mean. I think the intent is to prevent clickable links until you've posted enough that you're not likely to be a robot.

[alf55]

2). google is your best friend...."howto ______"(ie. "howto ifconfig", "howto networking", etc.)[you will want to squeeze as many keywords into the input line as possible!!!]

Better than "google" id the "Linux Google" search see:
<Linux> - Google Search

By the way there also specialized searched for other OS as well. (See the "advanced" link for more information.