Best distro for learning terminal

[patio87]

I'm looking for the most pure linux terminal distro. I am trying to learn linux and I have Ubunutu 10.10 installed but I feel like it's not as pure as other distros, like Ubuntu 10.10 is different from the average terminal experience.

Maybe I am wrong about this, but certain things like the grub .lst file is now a .cfg file in Ubuntu, is this replicated across all linux, or is this unique to Ubuntu? Little things like this that make it difficult to learn. Are all the distros unique in this way?

[MikeTbob]

I'm looking for the most pure linux terminal distro. I am trying to learn linux and I have Ubunutu 10.10 installed but I feel like it's not as pure as other distros, like Ubuntu 10.10 is different from the average terminal experience.

Maybe I am wrong about this, but certain things like the grub .lst file is now a .cfg file in Ubuntu, is this replicated across all linux, or is this unique to Ubuntu? Little things like this that make it difficult to learn. Are all the distros unique in this way?

Hello and Welcome.
There really is no one single best Linux distro. The best Distro is the one that works best for your needs. Ubuntu is a fine distro and there is nothing wrong with it.
Grub is responsible for the changes of .cfg vs .lst and not Ubuntu. You can apply either Grub legacy or Grub 2 to any system.
Almost all distros offer something that other distros don't, this is one of their ways of enticing you to try their distro. But the differences are usually only cosmetic, under the hood almost all distros are created equally. You can always boot Ubuntu to the command line if you want to experience Linux without all the bells and whistles.

[patio87]

Hello and Welcome.
There really is no one single best Linux distro. The best Distro is the one that works best for your needs. Ubuntu is a fine distro and there is nothing wrong with it.
Grub is responsible for the changes of .cfg vs .lst and not Ubuntu. You can apply either Grub legacy or Grub 2 to any system.
Almost all distros offer something that other distros don't, this is one of their ways of enticing you to try their distro. But the differences are usually only cosmetic, under the hood almost all distros are created equally. You can always boot Ubuntu to the command line if you want to experience Linux without all the bells and whistles.

As long as I am not partially shooting myself in the foot by learning linux with Ubunutu I feel good.

[MikeTbob]

As long as I am not partially shooting myself in the foot by learning Linux with Ubuntu I feel good.

You can do just about anything with Ubuntu as you can with any other distro. Ubuntu is pretty much the standard starting point for anyone new to Linux, with that being said, you can always broaden your horizons along the way by trying any distro that you might find useful or just interesting. The best part is, you can usually try them before you install them with most distros having what's called a LiveCD.
Distrowatch is the perfect place to find new and interesting things to try.
DistroWatch.com: Put the fun back into computing. Use Linux, BSD.
Good Luck and do let us know how it goes.

[patio87]

You can do just about anything with Ubuntu as you can with any other distro. Ubuntu is pretty much the standard starting point for anyone new to Linux, with that being said, you can always broaden your horizons along the way by trying any distro that you might find useful or just interesting. The best part is, you can usually try them before you install them with most distros having what's called a LiveCD.
Distrowatch is the perfect place to find new and interesting things to try.

Good Luck and do let us know how it goes.

Cool, thanks. Yeah I have been playing around with some live cd's/boot usb's for a while with Knoppix. I also have a livecd of Backtrack which looks like fun. Basically I am getting into linux because I'm getting heavily involved in network administration and security, so Linux is my obvious evolution.

[Nagarjuna]

As Mike was saying, you can do anything with Ubuntu that you can do with any other Linux distribution. There are tons of great websites out there with wonderful tutorials on learning Linux commands. I recommended this one as a starting point: LinuxCommand.org: Learn the Linux command line. Write shell scripts.

If your curious and would like to give another distribution a go, maybe give Arch Linux a shot. Just to set it up, you'll need to learn a good amount of information about Linux and it's command line. Luckily, Arch has some of the best documentation out there and has a beginners guide that touches each step in setting up a working Linux system from a pretty minimal (no GUI) starting point. You can find the guide here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Beginners'_Guide

I recommend Arch a lot because of how much it taught me. Next time you have some free time, maybe try it out as a virtual machine.

Happy learning

[theKbStockpiler]

It would be wise to read some guides on the su and sudo commands to run as root. I think it is customary to do this with Ubuntu but not with Mandriva and Fedora.Sudo lets you use the terminal as a user but with root privilages.


Good luck!