Linux Help

Hey everyone, real newbie here. Know more than some basic's on comps.My os is win98 if that should help. My big goal is to start learning Linux.I know nothing on linux,unix,etc. and am looking for advice, if you guys could give me linx that have books on linux for beginners or just plain text file sites that would be great. Im 16years old so its hard to find a real understanding book,text file. Should i be getting into Linux,or Unix? Dont know much about either the 2 only that they were created by Linus Traverold or somthing :) To be getting into exploring the internet world or hacking i guess i should say, should i be learning linux or unix? So many questions. Any help would be great. signing out.

bassic-'

I have the EXACT same problem!

Lets see where to start.......i would recomend you guys to either start with suse or redhat both are very easy to use if you go to linuxdocs.org you can find all those nifty little how-tos. If you ever dont know what a command does just type man and then what ever the command is like this
man grep
man ls
man vi
and so on and soforth if you get into trouble email me or post and ill help you guys out cuz linux though fun can be wquite frustrating then when you guys get better well move on to some real to slackware and then finaly openBSD

I would recomend you to start with Suse (www.suse.com) since it's a nice and easy distribution to start with.

If you buy the distribution it'll be included with a lots of books and a whole set of utilities on several cd's. I think this would be just enough to get a good start and a common understanding about suse and other linux distributions.

If you decide to download a copy from the internet, should I recomend you to install the complete suse helpsystem and a webserver of your own choice I would recomend apache though, and ofcourse a webbrowser of your own choice.

A last advice RTFM and have a lots of patience.. Soon a new world will open infront of your eyes :D

//Micael

Mandrake!

Linux Mandrake 8 would be a good starting ground... For a start everything comes pre-set up once you have installed it, if you buy a boxed version (or get one for Christmas) you should get fukll installation instructions [maybe even Installation Technical Support].

Once you've set up and run mandrake for a while I suggest you keep that on the machine, but also get another computer and try a different distro where you will have to set stuff up youself.
I actually went the other way - I installed RedHat 5.2 first as my very first experience with Linux, then discovered mandrake later... Sufficing to say mandrake is fine for what I use it for so thats all I use now on a permanent basis, but I try others from time to time just to see if I can actually get them working properly.

Linux and Unix are very similar, but since Linux is FREE I suggest you try that... Learning how to control Linux will put you in good stead when you're confronted with a UNIX box because they're very similar (the same?) from the command line.

Hope that helped!

Thanks for the information guys, this site really helps. Glad to be part of the team. Iv seen the Suse and RedHat software at BestBuy earlier today, but there were no books on anything, but like HTML,CGI. Theres a poll in general questions on the matter, suse,redhat,mandrake,or any others. Thanks for all the help guys! Get this some more posts!

bassic-'