Unix

:p

Hi to all..

Having been reading a lot of forums here on Antionline, and from talking to a few people, I have decided that I would like to get into Unix.
At home i am currently running windoze 2k with 256 Mb ram on a 10 Gb HDD. I would like to find out where is the best place to start using / playing with / reading about it to get up and running and dual booting on my system, but not sodding up my current installation of w2k.
If I start playing around with it will i knacker anything up or can i just reinstall with no probs or wot?

Any advice gratefully recieved! Thanks everyone!


ps would like to get into programming too, so hints in that direction would be cool too... I'm not a maths expert so anything with none or very little would be a great help!

:confused:

Keep a dual booting. Even so windows isn't the best OS, I dare say it has some good stuff on it. Have a look a http://www.linux.org and look for dual booting in the howto section.
To start with programing, I'd suggest ether shell scripting/c or perl.
Perl is kinda straight forward and portable but c is kinda faster for some stuff. It all depends what you want to do.

HTH

You'll need a good dual booter program installed on either a floppy disk or the master boot record. Suse7.2+ comes with LiLo (LInuxLOader) and should automatically detect your Windows partition, as should RedHat 7+.

If you want to do some programming, try bash scripting or perl before moving on to something more complicated like C/C++.

Installing Unix shouldn't destroy your Windows partition (unlike if you tried to install Windows *after* Unix!), but you should back up all your important files just in case.

Good luck!

Step 1, since you are using Windows 2000, get Partition Magic and make your partitions with this software. fips and some others are Okay but Partition Magic has a much higher success rate.

Step 2, make a partition for Unix after your Windows 2000 partition. I would suggest at least 1 GB of disk space if you can manage that.

Step 3, Go to http://www.linuxiso.org and get FreeBSD. I suggest FreeBSD over Linux for a couple of reasons. a) it is Unix and Linux is not. b) Uniformity c) FreeBSD is free, it is Unix, it has a ton of packages in the ports collection ready to make && make install && make clean :D

Step 4, Install FreeBSD on your partition

Step 5, Go to these sites and read/do/learn how to use Unix.
http://www.freebsddiary.org , http://www.bsdvault.net , http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO...ooks/handbook/ , http://flag.blackened.net/freebsd/ , http://www.instinct.org/~pgl/freebsd-links.html , http://unixgeeks.org/main.html . Those should get you started, I am sure you will pick up some great links of your own along the way.

Step 6, Take the plunge all the way. That is, try not to boot into Windows for 30-45 days. Learn how to do everything you would normally do in Windows on your FreeBSD install. This will get you comfortable within Unix quickly so you can focus on learning the advanced stuff.

Step 7, join some FreeBSD mailing lists like freebsd-newbies, and freebsd-questions. They are a fantastic way to get help. I think you will find that FreeBSD users on the whole are more compitent in using/configuring/admin a machine than Linux users. /* no offense to Linux users, I am one too */ You will find it hard to stump subscribers of these mailing lists. If you are interested in FreeBSD/Unix security subscribe to freebsd-security.

CAUTION: if you join freebsd-hackers, know that in the Unix world this has little or nothing to do with security, freebsd-hackers is where kernel/device driver programmers discuss the development of new ideas for upcoming changes in FreeBSD Current/Release/Stable etc. If you ask *hacking*, *cracking*, or questionable security-ish questions you will most likely get flamed and or banned.

hope this helped.

P.S. a lot, if not most of the software commonly packaged for Linux is also available for FreeBSD. Just look in /usr/ports, when you find a package you want to install cd into it's directory and do
`make && make install && make clean'

:D

Hi guys and thanks for the replies, very helpful and thanks for all the links... Some great sites there UberC0der.

Not sure I have my head fully round it, but will do a lot of browsing and reading before installing etc!

Once again, thanks... Will be pursuing the programming too..

God, there is so much out there, scary isn't it??


:killcompu