OS recommendation? a Newbie asking where to start

[notShai]

hello Linuxers

i am a Windows IT guy with 10 years system admin experience.

i have an itch for Linux.

reasons - to delve into the security aspects of networks and to enhance my career flexibility especially in the financial and pharma fields.

i have a few Dell servers available to play with.

can someone recommend a good starting point?
which Linux is the-
most popular in corporate enviroments?
most popular in security related apps?

is this forum Unix friendly?
if so i would ask the same adding the UNIX word into the questions...

thank you!

[void_false]

am a Windows IT guy with 10 years system admin experience.

That won't help you.

most popular in corporate enviroments

Red Hat, AFAIK.

most popular in security related apps

OpenBSD is for security paranoids

[oz]

Welcome to the forums!

Check my signature for lots of good information on getting started with Linux.

Good luck with it... hope it turns out well for you.

[techieMoe]

i have an itch for Linux.

I'm pretty sure there's a cream for that...

can someone recommend a good starting point?

I would also recommend our introductory thread, which is found in ozar's signature above.

which Linux is the-
most popular in corporate enviroments?

In the USA, it's Redhat and Novell SuSE. In Europe I believe it's Mandriva.

is this forum Unix friendly?
if so i would ask the same adding the UNIX word into the questions...

Are we talking about commercial, closed-source UNIX or open-source UNIX? If it's the latter, you'll probably have a decent amount of help if you want to play with one of the Berkeley distributions (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD). If however we're talking about HP-UX or z/OS not many folks will be familiar.

There are a lot of operations that BSD, Linux and UNIX share in common, such as common text editors (vi, emacs) and whatnot. Shell scripting is similar across all three as well. You might get some good help in those realms that cross over.

[Freston]

There are a lot of operations that BSD, Linux and UNIX share in common, such as common text editors (vi, emacs) and whatnot. Shell scripting is similar across all three as well. You might get some good help in those realms that cross over.

And of course the File System Hierarchy. Although differences between distro's and between nixes in general exist (init scripts, anyone?? ), the differences are far far less than between Redmond and the nixes.

In Europe I believe it's Mandriva.

France maybe. I see a lot of SLED, Red Hat and CentOS in advertisements. But Debian as well. And Open Office (not Openoffice.org) uses ubuntu.

is this forum Unix friendly?
if so i would ask the same adding the UNIX word into the questions...

Well, this forum is very friendly

am a Windows IT guy with 10 years system admin experience.

That won't help you.

I'm afraid I agree with void_false. You start tabula rasa, just like the rest of us

No it's not 100% true, you still have your knowledge of hardware, infrastructure, TCP/IP, that sort of thing. But devices, permissions, drivers, printers(!!!!!!!), networking tools, they are all different. Your machines don't have drives anymore. They have mountpoints and filesystems. Ah... the list goes on.

i have an itch for Linux.

That's all you need. The will to learn, and a machine that you can test on.



I don't often recommend Slackware to people. But you might want to look into that. Slackware is thought to be the most unix like of the Linuxes. And it'll teach you command line configuration, which I believe will enhance your flexibility. It's no use studying each and every YAST option only to find your best job offer uses a Debian based system :s

Have fun and don't be to shy to ask questions!

[notShai]

void_false, ozar, techieMoe, Freston, thank you !

i checked ozar's sig looks very helpful. ya'll gave me the ingredients more or less.

the next stop i guess is Google and a blank Dell server and lots of wasted RW CD's?

this itch comes fromthe need to use other then windows for an IDS like Snort etc, i guess the diff Linux names (distros?) you guys mentioned are all fine for a security apps?

security is what i'd like to concentrate on. (a windows-linux-routers sandwich)

thanks again!