Novice

Hi all

I know nothing about Linux. I am just going through the course on Linux.org and haven't even installed a version yet. Any advice for the beginner would be most welcome.

Cheers
Al

I'd suggest installing Virtualbox on whatever system you're current using and play with Linux as a virtual machine. The nice thing about that approach is that you can try anything you like without worrying about crashing your machine or creating a mess that's hard to clean up. If you do make a big mess, just delete the VM and start over. It's not a problem. And you can even do the basic Linux setup, meaning install the OS and add on package you like, then just clone that VM each time you want to experiment. That way if you decide to start over with a "clean" Linux after experimenting, you don't even have to go through the installation process again.

Thanks for this, I will follow your advice although I was going to fresh install on an old Dell Inspiron... I think I'll give it a trial run first. Cheers.

Well if you have idle equipment around then I'd definitely use it. I still think having Virtualbox installed someplace, maybe even on the Linux system on the Dell(?), is useful. It lets you experiment with random software, system configurations, and in general just messing around with the OS without worrying about making the OS controlling the actual hardware unusable.

Having extra hardware is nice since even if you completely mess up your Linux server, you have another system to use while you get it working again. But I think installing an OS on real hardware is more tedious and time consuming then setting up a new VM. So I try to test things virtually before moving them to the OS controlling the hardware directly.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by ajq74

Any advice for the beginner would be most welcome.

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Hello and welcome aboard, ajq74! :)

You can check the link in my user signature for some good tips about Linux, and there are a couple of quizzes there that might help you to pick your first distribution(s) for starting out.

Good luck to you with your endeavors...

Welcome to the forum. In addition to our pages, you will find a lot of good informatin by using Google for your problems. Linux users are usually very willing to share solutions. Another good resource is distrowatch.com, it has info on over 700 different distro's, a search feature to help you select, and a ranking feature which list the top 100 distro's in order of popularity.