Hi everyone I am a recovering distro junkie trying to settle down with a stable distro that works. Coming down from being hopped up on pretty colored GUI's and cool icon designs with little overall functionality distro's has been a humbling experience for me (especially realizing the with all time I spent experimenting with the others I could have created my own distro by now.) I would really like to get to know linux from the bottm up and i think slack is probably the best way to go. I just need a bit of guidance on what the best place to start would be.


What was most descriptive and helpful for you:
Linux man pages, websites, books , or was it an experience of constant sifting through mumbo-jumbo from all sources .


slack


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I had to come back after reading everyones story and just give a "BIG OLE THANK YOU". Each and every bit of advice, story, and comment was so much more than helpful and interesting in every way. I really appreciate eveyone's input.
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yeah, for me it was/is constant sifting through mumbo-jumbo from all sources...

and this was/is my mumbo-jumbo sifter: http://www.google.com/linux

Same here. I actually learnt a lot more when I decided to totally abandon windoze a few years ago. I really struggled but eventually perserverance and patience helped.

I learned alot from installing gentoo it isn't that hard if you follow the directions

I would suggest http://slackbook.org/ and if you've a doubt, first try reading the man pages.
I personally think it's faster to take a look at a man page or searching something on the web than making a question and waiting for an answer

Edit: Forgot to post my history
I started with RedHat 5.2, it was horrible that time. I started trying different OS until I finally got a that RH cd (I had dial-up, couldn't afford to download a distro) and installed it. It didn't support my SiS card (yeah, linux has evolved since those times), and as I was new with the system, couldn't get X to work and got frustrated. After sometime I could get others cds and play with it again (SuSe 6 and CorelLinux) it was funny, but couldn't get a usable desktop. I was away from it agan trying BeOS, QNX, etc, and finally got broadband. Downloaded Slackware and 2 years ago here I'm

I started using linux about 4 years ago. I wasn't sure about i would do after my baa and i though that a little bit of Unix knowledge would be a plus. I erase my windows to force myself using it! I started with redhat 7.something. When i started to understand the man command and the parameters, the file structure, what is rpm, etc.. linux became more friendly.
The problem is often how to define keywords of the situation to make a quick search and find the answer. wrong question ~= wrong answer. I was often on distrowatch and tried some forums and decided to do it by myself because i couldn't get answers fast enough. ...Homeworks due the next day while i was try to find the way to be productive without too much pain...

FreeBSD made me more advanced with linux somehow, 1 week doing it from the console. I was looking for a way to get my adsl working and kde+xfree running. Now i can switch to any major linux distribution with no problem(rpm ones, deb ones, source ones and the rest).

I think the book Running Linux (O'Reilly book) helped me as much as anything. I started linux the first time with RH 5.2. I have tried several linux distros and bsds over the years. I think you can learn from any of them if you really want to. Slack sort of forces you to do so, so does gentoo. But alot of the learning in gentoo is more distro specific rather than linux.

I bought a copy of Red hat 6.1 at half price books and then played around with it on an semi-old computer that I didnt care about messing up. So after a few weeks of mutiple installs and just exploring xwindows, I bought a book on red hat, learned a lot about the command line. Finally I discovered there is a vast amount of support on the internet, i.e. LQ. And its been down hill from there.

i have not long started i installed linux along side xp just after i joined the form. i like the suse flavor but then have only ever used dyneabolic and the many different knoppix flavors so mostly live disks my first install was suse 9.1 and since my first install i have broke it 5 times lol and thats only when i needed to reinstall ahhh fun

at the mo i am trying to find a way to compile from source (many seem to fail) and clean up the amount of space taken up by the os. (gets dvd for reinstall )

I've learned linux from the constant sifting through information. This forum and www.google.ie/linux have become invaluable. Be lost without them. Oh, and there's nothing like getting rid of the safety net (windows) to accelerate your learning.

Anybody who tells you they know all there is to know is both a jackass and a liar.... You never stop learning, and there's always something you don't know. Places like this forum are very useful when you come across something you don't know, and here's my order of places to check:

http://tldp.org/
http://google.com/
http://linuxquestions.org/

And if that fails, I return to google until I find the information, and then write a mini-howto which ends up on my website. (any additions or corrections are welcome, btw )

As for when I *first* started learning Linux? That was back when http://tldp.org was http://linuxdoc.org/ ... the 2nd URL now points to tldp, but back then, it wasn't tldp at all. I can remember having to choose whether to *upgrade* to the 2.2 kernel series when it came out. Aside from linuxdoc.org, I can't really remember where else I went. I think I was using Webcrawler at that time, but it might have been Altavista... this was about 5 years BG. (before Google). I switched to "high speed" (128k ISDN) and needed a firewall setup. I haven't heard modem screech in over a decade. Aside from that firewall, I was still running Windows-based computers until quite recently..... Ahh, Trumpet Winsock, how I don't miss thee....


as an aside, I *think* that Webcrawler was the first target of a website hijack attempt. There was a porn site whose address was http://webcralwer.com (notice the reversed w and l). Ahh... good times, back in the days before popups and spyware....

I bought a linux magazine.
It included Mandrake 7.2 discs......
there you go........tried Red Hat, Debian, Slackware, Knoppix, Gentoo,Ubuntu, now I use FC3

linuxquestions.org has been my biggest help the community here is awsome ( cept for the people who take things to seriously ) and along side LQ it was google and 2 years later im here helping people that was in my situation

Where I started learning Linux.

Put a different bunch of distro's in VMWare, a few of them didn't recognize the VMWare network card, away with them, some of them installed pretty slow, away with them. Some seem to complex (in the way the system is set up). A few of them seemed to difficult for a beginner like a was half a year ago. Slack installed fast, recognized everything and was fast.

So I threw away al the VMWare images, burned the slack 10.0 CD's and removed XP from the machine and set myself a goal to make it a Slackware mailserver - webserver - webmail - ftpserver - php - mysql - server

I just began, installing, figuring out some things, what I didn't know I:

Googled
LQ-ed
and offcourse type in man from time to time.

in that order

After a week (with almost no linux-knowledge when i started) a week later i had my server ready.

So set yourself a few goals and throw in that slackware cd

Slackware is the way to go...and it is no big secret that you learn a hell lot while being a slacker

My first brush with Linux was somewhere in early 1998. At that time, I lived in India and I got introduced to Linux through one of my undergrad course which required C and Fortran programming (and our labs had Linux since the school was on a budget). I was fascinated by the idea of an operating system other than Linux and tried to give it a shot. I had an assembled box and had no documentation whatsoever. Nonetheless, I happen to get a linux cd (i believe it was Red Hat 3 or something) from a tech magazine and I installed it...not knowing i would need documentation and had none.

I was not aware of dual boot at that time so i removed windows altogether and managed to install Linux but i could not manage to start any desktop environment (I believe the cd had KDE at that time but no gnome) and was left with CLI. I used linux for some time for programming but eventually I dumped it because i didn't know how to do general tasks like listening music, word processing etc. Internet was also not so big at that time in India and it was really expensive to go online so no external help.

After this i didn't get time to look at Linux until last year when i thought how about giving linux a shot again. By this time, I had stopped following linux and knew nothing about recent changes to I took time about 15 days to read about "what's new" in linux. Following this, I took the plunge early 2004 with RH 9. Since then i've changed a lot of distro to see how they feel and finally i've settled with Slackware. Although I have other distros I hardly get out of slackware...

LQ was my first choice of learning, and I've couple books to clear the basics...and ofcourse there are man pages and google/linux.
Tux,