My first Linux question.

[paveway]

To my friends nowdays, I am known as "the computer guy." Whenever they have trouble with their machine, they call me. Yeah I get tired of it but in the end it is always fulfilling.

I started out in 6th grade, when I asked my dad if I could build my own box for my birthday. He was stunned but nevertheless I accomplished my task and thus started my trek into nerddom. In High School I hung out with the geeks. I was more into hardware and they were always into networking and programming. They always tried to get me to get into Linux. "It's so much better than Windows!" they would say, but me, being the hardware enthusiast I was, always turned to overclocking and benchmarking for my excitement. They went off to be systems admins for Rackspace, and I went off to (slowly...) get my degree. Since then, I have somewhat dropped off from being the techie I once was (staying up until 2am working on something). I have always kept up with new stuff, but not the way I used to.

So now I am just simply, "the computer guy."

About two weeks ago I saw something on the way home from class that almost made me slam my brakes... a billboard that said:

Know Linux? We're hiring!
555-1234

I never thought I would ever see that in my life. I guess I should have listened to my friends! So, when I got home, I grabbed an old case and did some inventory of old spare parts I had. Nothing really fit together. I hopped on Newegg and started ordering everything I need to put together a cheap machine so I can finally LEARN.

Soooooo, HI EVERYBODY! I am very much looking forward to scouring these forums for information on my new endeavor. I guess my first question is, what should I do? What should my first lesson be with linux?

[MikeTbob]

To my friends nowdays, I am known as "the computer guy." Whenever they have trouble with their machine, they call me. Yeah I get tired of it but in the end it is always fulfilling.

I started out in 6th grade, when I asked my dad if I could build my own box for my birthday. He was stunned but nevertheless I accomplished my task and thus started my trek into nerddom. In High School I hung out with the geeks. I was more into hardware and they were always into networking and programming. They always tried to get me to get into Linux. "It's so much better than Windows!" they would say, but me, being the hardware enthusiast I was, always turned to overclocking and benchmarking for my excitement. They went off to be systems admins for Rackspace, and I went off to (slowly...) get my degree. Since then, I have somewhat dropped off from being the techie I once was (staying up until 2am working on something). I have always kept up with new stuff, but not the way I used to.

So now I am just simply, "the computer guy."

About two weeks ago I saw something on the way home from class that almost made me slam my brakes... a billboard that said:

Know Linux? We're hiring!
555-1234

I never thought I would ever see that in my life. I guess I should have listened to my friends! So, when I got home, I grabbed an old case and did some inventory of old spare parts I had. Nothing really fit together. I hopped on Newegg and started ordering everything I need to put together a cheap machine so I can finally LEARN.

Soooooo, HI EVERYBODY! I am very much looking forward to scouring these forums for information on my new endeavor. I guess my first question is, what should I do? What should my first lesson be with linux?

Hello and Welcome to the forums. I'd suggest that your first endeavor should be to find a distro that is right for you.
Check out this little quiz, it's insanely good.
zegenie Studios Linux Distribution Chooser

[paveway]

Cool! I took the test and the result was Mandriva, Ubuntu, and OpenSuSE.

My intentions with this machine are to set it in a corner somewhere with only power and cat5 and control it with my windows box (for now). I'm installing SuSE right now!

[jayd512]

Welcome to LinuxForums!

Have you hit the link provided by Mike? It's actually pretty good for picking a first distro.
Let us know what you pick!

[jayd512]

You beat me back!

Ubuntu would probably be a good choice.
Easy to use, but you can still get in there and break some stuff!

[paveway]

It's not too late to change to Ubuntu.

This last winter I lost a hard drive with lots of stuff on it. Got me to thinkin that I need to consider a RAID array. The machine I will be installing on has 2 1Tb hard drives that are identical. I figure that could be my first challenge! Configure a Linux comp so that I can use it as a file server on my local network and store important stuff on it.

Can I set up a RAID array during install, or do I have to install it on one hard drive first? My motherboard CLAIMS hardware raid but I cant find the BIOS settings anywhere. I'm looking to do a RAID 1 array.

[Rubberman]

Linux has software raid support, so you don't need to futz with the BIOS settings to use it. Describe your hardware setup, and we can advise you on what to do. Myself, my first Linux OS was Gentoo (also known as jumping in the deep end of the pool!). Currently, I have systems that run QNX (real-time OS), Gentoo, Ubuntu, and Scientific Linux. I also run the latest QNX in a VM under Scientific Linux, as well as Windows and Solaris x86 (also in VM's). FWIW, I only run Windows in a VM any more. It makes virus scrubbing a lot easier - just revert to last snapshot.

[Rubberman]

Also, I run Debian Edge Linux (2.6.21 kernel) on an ARM embedded system board for software development for manufacturing and warehousing/distribution control systems.

[paveway]

Rubberman, thats all greek to me! Hopefully I can get to your level one day!

The hardware I'm using:
AMD Sempron 140
2GB ram
2x1TB hard drives.

So I got over my first hurdle last night... installing SuSE using the two hard drives as a RAID1 array. The first time I installed it, I partitioned the two drives in their entirety as ext3 and forgot the swap partition.

Today I tried it again, making a partition on each HD 1gb in size for the swap and RAID1'd the two partitions together. Then, I RAID1'd the remaining space on each drive and installed! Boots up like a charm!

My next goal is to be able to control this box via my windows7 machine in the other room(SSH?), but I am having trouble connecting to it using Putty. I have a thread open in the newbie forums (can't link the thread because I don't have 15 or more posts).